Linguistic Justice: An Interdisciplinary Overview of The Literature

Linguistic Justice: An Interdisciplinary
Overview of the Literature
Javier Alcalde
1 Introduction
This chapter aims at offering an interdisciplinary analytical overview of the different

approaches provided by the academic literature to the study of linguistic justice.
It deliberately focuses the biggest part of its attention on political philosophy.
Therefore, it presents in depth most of the arguments within this area of research,
divided into two broad categories (multiculturalism and equalitarian liberalism),
with an added emphasis in the territoriality vs personality debate. Although the
authors referenced are many, particular detail is given to the work of De Schutter,
Kymlicka, Laitin, May, Patten, Peled, and Van Parijs.
Regarding the economics perspective, the text tackles its most influential authors,
such as Pool, Selten, Grin, Wickström, or Gazzola, and their policy analysis on the
different issues related to resource allocation (efficiency) and resource distribution
(fairness) of language policy. Afterward, the chapter deals with a broad field that
includes sociolinguistics and other subfields of linguistics, such as ecolinguistics,
applied linguistics, but also education studies. Here the main authors are Phillipson
This chapter is based on a research funded by Esperantic Studies Foundation (ESF), whose support
is gratefully acknowledged, and supervised by Michele Gazzola and Bengt-Arne Wickström
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany), Mark Fettes (Simon Fraser University, Canada),
Sabine Fiedler (Universität Leipzig, Germany), Goro Christoph Kimura (上智大学—Sophia
University, Japan), and Renato Corsetti (Università Sapienza, Italy). See also Alcalde (2015b, c,
2016a).
J. Alcalde ()
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: jalcaldevi@uoc.edu
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 65

M. Gazzola et al. (eds.), Language Policy and Linguistic Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75263-1_2
66 J. Alcalde
and Skutnabb-Kangas. Several of the most influential Catalan and Spanish authors
are also included, such as Bastardas or Moreno Cabrera. Related to this discipline,
many experts in interlinguistics and esperantology are also presented. Among them,
Fettes, Tonkin, and Fiedler are the ones reviewed more in depth. The last theoretical
section is the one on law, and here the only two major authors are Mowbray and
Pupavac. As this chapter focuses on the emerging interdisciplinary research area of
linguistic justice, it deliberately departs from the notion of “linguistic rights.” There
are different overlaps between the two research areas, but the concept of linguistic
rights is the object of a distinct and vast literature, mainly anchored in law, which is
not possible to present here.
The text does not aim at exhaustiveness, but it offers examples of the different
theories and approaches related to the concept. Therefore, despite not discussing
every work from every relevant author, as a whole, it offers a broad panorama of the
state of the art in the field. When possible, the focus is on the criteria proposed to
decide how a fair society should be organized from a language policy perspective.
Given that this is a field characterized by an interdisciplinary approach, it is not
infrequent to find philosophers who write about economy, for example, or who
incorporate sociolinguistic insights. Therefore, some of the authors presented in
this chapter can be found in more than one section, whereas others are located in a
section which is different from their academic affiliation.
2 Political Philosophy
2.1 Constitutivism vs. Instrumentalism
Political philosophers have only recently become interested in language policy.

In the 1990s, language policy was often considered as an implicit subset of
more general theories on multiculturalism and cultural recognition, as presented in
different works by authors such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Will Kymlicka,
and Seyla Benhabib. Many theorists who now turn to language are, in fact, applying
their larger theories to this field.
Such authors are not concerned with the study of actual language policies or with
empirical research on linguistic diversity. They deal specifically with the normative
political reaction toward languages. For this reason, Helder De Schutter (2007)
suggests that an appropriate way to refer to this field is linguistic justice, similar
to debates about socioeconomic or environmental justice. Therefore, in order to
study linguistic justice, they begin by setting specific normative principles of justice.
Afterward, they use language as one of the dimensions or applications of their
theories.
Linguistic Justice: An Interdisciplinary Overview of the Literature 67
This debate has its origins in the liberalism-communitarianism tension of the

1980s. Communitarians (e.g., Sandel 1982; Taylor 1992) questioned the individual-
ism of Rawls and answered by emphasizing a more culturally embedded picture of
the self where identity is one of its essential elements.
De Schutter (2007) reviews the literature by constructing a typology through two
different dimensions. The first is between an instrumental, i.e., language is a tool to
communicate thought (as presented in different works by authors such as John Stuart
Mill), and a constitutive understanding of the nature of membership in a linguistic
community, i.e., language constitutes who I am, my identity (as defended in several
works by authors such as Johann G. von Herder and Johann G. Fichte). The second
is between a transparent and a hybrid concept of language.
As we will see, among those who will try to bridge both traditions there is Will
Kymlicka, who will argue that individual autonomy requires a cultural context of
choices. Liberal nationalists (including different works by David Miller, Yael Tamir,
and Margaret Moore) and liberal multiculturalists (among others, several works by
Joseph Raz, Joseph H. Carens, and Amy Gutmann) will agree on defending the
moral and political importance of cultural membership. In language policy terms,
this means granting cultural minority groups language (and other cultural) rights.
Both ideas are contested by those who deny the idea of minority rights, such as
Brian Barry (2001) or Chandran Kukathas (2003). They argue that the state should
remain neutral in this issue, as it remains neutral in other similar issues, such as
religion. And then most authors will respond that language is a different issue in
which being neutral is simply not possible.
To a large extent, contemporary debates over language policy still follow this
distinction. On the one hand, constitutivists argue that language groups are entitled
to receive language rights and language protection, either from an objectivist way
(the language is important for the constitution of the self) or from a subjectivist
one (if a group claims language rights, these should be granted). De Schutter says
that both approaches need each other: objectivism without subjectivism would be
undemocratic; subjectivism without objectivism would be illegitimate. According to
most of these authors (e.g., Réaume 2003), a just theory of language policy should
accommodate linguistic groups and grant language rights to linguistic minorities to
remedy the injustice that arises when they are forced to live their life in the language
of majorities. On the other hand, instrumentalists see languages as tools to perform
nonlinguistically defined things. They normally accept the constitutive element of
language, but they think that nonidentity-related policy aims are more important
than the identity issues.
In sum, political philosophy is one of the most fruitful (and promising) disci-
plines in the study of linguistic justice. In this section, after examining the weak
points and the main subdomains of the field, two schools of thought are presented:
multiculturalism and equalitarian liberalism. Both of them share the same unit of
analysis, which is the individual—plus his/her (linguistic) rights and the fairness
68 J. Alcalde
of his/her relationships with other individuals—not the language per se.1 Different
authors agree on this division focusing on different aspects.2
2.2 Alternative Views
According to De Schutter, Peled, and others, the main flaw in the debate is an
inappropriate reliance on a very Westphalian and outdated empirical understanding
of the concept of language itself, which takes the world to be a set of separate
monolingual geographical areas populated by monolingual speakers. Therefore,
three are the main mistaken assumptions, which sociolinguists (among others) have
extensively proven wrong:
(a) Monolingual speakers
(b) Transparent boundaries
(c) Non-variable linguistic identity
For example, both Van Parijs and Kymlicka—to mention two of the most
influential authors in this field—recommend similar language policies, which
recognize a single official language to each territory. Van Parijs does so by following
the linguistic territoriality principle. Kymlicka argues for self-government rights
to each community to enable its members to maintain their own language and
culture. In other words, they try to make political and territorial boundaries coincide
with cultural and linguistic ones. But this concept of language and culture is
unrealistically homogeneous. In fact, such convergence is in the real world an
exception.
In this literature cases that do not fit very well into the frame of monocultural and
monolingual situations are treated as insignificant and vague details.3 However, they
include a vast number of diverse phenomena, such as cultural overlap, bilingualism,
cultural diffusion, diglossia, minorities within minorities, etc. Some examples are
the following:
(a) Two or more ethnic groups claim the same land.
(b) Two or more language groups live intermixed in a way that drawing consistent
borders around monolingual groups is not possible.
1 It has to be noted that some multiculturalists, the so-called communitarians (e.g., Sandel), would
not necessarily agree, because they understand the community as the subject of the analysis.
2 For example, De Schutter (2007) speaks about the constitutive nature of the speakers (or
linguistically embodied subjects) to characterize multiculturalism and the instrumental nature of

the speakers to characterize liberal equalitarians. On another front, Archibugi (2005a, b, 2008),
among others, argues that multiculturalism is concerned with a close relationship between language
and identity, whereas liberal equalitarians (particularly in their cosmopolitan version) understand
language mainly as means of communication.
3 A remarkable exception is Riera (2016), who focuses on linguistic justice for mixed societies. See
Sect. 2.5 of this chapter.

(c) Situations of linguistic pluralism and linguistic hybridity such as bicultural

bilinguals who do not consider themselves to be rooted in one group or another.
Moreover, such understanding of language makes certain linguistic preferences
less legitimate than others. In concrete, those with a cosmopolitan linguistic attitude
(or simply bilingual speakers) will be less taken into account than monolinguals.
2.3 Subdomains of Research
When it comes to the target or the context of application of the language policies,
linguistic justice theories can be divided into three (interdependent) subdomains:
(a) Multilingual settings: regions with more than one language. However, authors
still disagree in a range of questions, such as if “immigrant languages” should
be treated like “native languages” or if it matters the fact that minorities are
concentrated in a region or dispersed through the country.
According to Patten (2001), the dominant language policies in the literature
are those who aim at:
1. Guaranteeing equality along linguistic lines, by promoting the equal success
of each of the languages. This kind of language policies often end up
encouraging language diversity.
2. Guaranteeing equality along nonlinguistic lines, by promoting, e.g., socioe-
conomic equality of opportunities. This kind of language policies often end
up encouraging language homogenization.
3. Giving equal support to all languages with a per capita prorating: bigger
language groups get more support than smaller groups.
4. Giving equal support to all languages with an inverse per capita rating:
smaller and weaker languages get more support than the bigger and stronger
ones.
(b) Interlingual settings: transnational constellations, such as the EU or the UN. On
one side of the spectrum, some scholars argue for linguistic pluralism, “politics
in the vernacular,” where each member speaks his or her own language. From
this perspective, translation will play a major role in these settings. On the other
side, the proposal is linguistic homogenization, i.e., each member switches to
a lingua franca (increasingly English), with or without compensation for those
people for whom that lingua franca is a second language.
(c) International linguistic settings: This deals with diversity as a moral value,
language death, and linguistic globalization. Some scholars think that every
language loss calls for urgent political action. The opposite view says that
there is nothing wrong with language death. Intermediate positions will call
for political action only when the causes for the loss are unjust.
70 J. Alcalde
(d) Global cities. A fourth emerging subdomain is the local level. For example,
a recent contribution by Fettes (2015) argues that in today’s highly urbanized
world, language planning should shift toward policies centered at the cities,
often more multilingual and cosmopolitan than their national or regional
counterparts.4
Among the whole universe of cases, some of them are particularly studied in
this field. Catalonia, the Basque Country, Belgium, and Quebec, to name a few,
are among those that account for many references in the literature, especially from
the perspective of minority rights.5 However, when it comes to thinking about
the possibility of applying a common international language, then the European
integration takes the lead, together with the UN and even the League of Nations, to
test the implementation of different theories of linguistic justice. In fact, one of the
better articulated proposals in the whole field of linguistic justice (Van Parijs 2011a)
takes precisely Europe as a point of departure.6
2.4 Schools of Thought

2.4.1 Multiculturalism
Within the discipline of (liberal) political theory, some of the most relevant pieces
of research on linguistic justice have come from theorists of multiculturalism (also
known as liberal culturalism, politics of recognition or politics of difference), as
part of their understanding of justice. In concrete, they have focused on linguistic
rights of minority groups. Among the main authors, Kymlicka and Taylor tend to
be the most cited ones. In this section I will also present other authors that, without
being explicitly multiculturalists, do share with them the criticisms to the liberal
equalitarian theories represented by Van Parijs.
From this perspective, linguistic justice means protecting the linguistic rights of
minority groups. The aim is to allow these minorities to use their language in the
public sphere to balance the injustice and inequality that would happen if they had
to shift to another language. And this is so even if the other language is majoritarian
in the society and it could, therefore, allow communication with a higher number
of human beings. Being able to maintain their own language and to use it in every
aspect of life is understood as part of their equality of opportunity. This way the
4 In this regard, also Tonkin (2016) considers the city as the center of the (language policy) analysis.
He draws parallels between building a city and building a language, with Esperanto being a
cosmopolitan identity across cities. About linguistic justice in the cities, see also Alcalde (2016b).
5 A relevant exception is Bjørhusdal (2016), who studies the case of Norway.
6 For an in-depth analysis of the linguistic justice proposals for international organizations,
including see Fettes and Bolduc (1998), Fiedler (2010), Barbier (2012), and Fettes (2015), see
Sect. 7 in Alcalde (2015b).
context of choice is protected to the extent that every individual has freedom of
choice. Obviously, a first criticism of multiculturalism is feasibility. In other words,
in its purest version, this theory is not applicable because our societies are too
multilingual and they are made up with thousands of individuals speaking dozens of
different languages; therefore, it would not be possible to design a language policy
that effectively uses all of them in the public sphere. That is why multiculturalists
tend to recommend language policies that protect (some) established minorities (not
all of them), through language recognition (i.e., official status) for the minority
language and its use in the public education system. Typical examples of such
minorities who deserve language rights include the case of the Catalans in Spain
and the case of Quebec in Canada. In the next pages, I will review the most relevant
arguments related to this school of thought.
Kymlicka, Will. A famous quote by him (1995: 111) is useful to remind us that
the state cannot be neutral when dealing with language issues: “Many liberals say
that just as the state should not recognize, endorse, or support any particular church,
so it should not recognize, endorse, or support any particular cultural group or
identity. But the analogy does not work. It is quite possible for a state not to have an
established church. But the state cannot help but give at least partial establishment
to a culture when it decides which language is to be used in public schooling, or in
the provision of state services. The state can (and should) replace religious oaths in
courts with secular oaths, but it cannot replace the use of English in courts with no
language.”
He criticizes Rawls’ (1971) conception of equality, i.e., “whatever interest
individuals have in cultural membership is subordinated to their interest in securing
the liberties of equal citizenship” (Kymlicka 1989: 162).
In his different works, Kymlicka (e.g. 1995, 2001 and 2004) explains that our
life choices are always made from within a specific context which we cannot
choose. And this context is determined by our (language and) culture. Therefore,
people will have an interest in having granted access to their culture because it is
their culture which constitutes their context of choice. For this reason, all national
minorities should have the opportunity to maintain themselves as distinct cultures,
and language policies should be designed accordingly.
As far as immigrants are concerned, two goals need to be considered. In order
to achieve integration, they should learn the dominant language of their new state,
but in order to grant equality of life choices, there should be no requirement for
them to abandon their mother tongue. And a similar idea could be applied to those
international students who study abroad.
His distinction between national minorities and ethnic (or immigrant) minorities
has been very influential in the literature, but also criticized by authors such as
Meital Pinto or Iris Young. They show that such distinction is often blurred in reality,
and therefore, it could establish a normative bias and prejudice regarding the type
of rights every group should be entitled to.
Patten, Alan (2001), was one of the first political theorists to raise specific
research questions about linguistic justice:
72 J. Alcalde
– To what extent is language protection a requirement of justice?

– To what extent is language loss a moral loss?
– Under which circumstances would language loss demand political action?
– What does “language equality” mean as a normative goal?
In another work (Patten 2003a), he offers a number of arguments for multilin-
gualism. In each case, he tries to discern what sort of language regime (territorial
vs. personality-based) the argument tends to favor.7 For example, an understanding
of language rights based on access to public institutions will favor the personality
principle rather than regionalist language policies based on the territory. On the
contrary, the social mobility argument favors a territorial principle, provided that the
language community is big enough. Therefore, in places where millions of speakers
of the same language live in close proximity, it is possible to have a (reasonably
complete) set of social institutions in that language, which ensures that members of
the language community do not face diminished opportunities; however, in places
where the language community has not enough numbers, there is no prospect of
equal opportunity unless they acquire a more dominant language.
The language policy that makes most sense is then to promote minority languages
where they are viable and to promote integration (i.e., assimilation) elsewhere.
Patten also thinks that social cohesion and democratic participation arguments
support the principle of territoriality. On the contrary, (intrinsic) identity would
support a personality-based language policy. And this is so because language is
constitutive of identity, and therefore people should have the right to the identity
they prefer, without considering (the geographical place) where they are.
To sum up, Patten supports a constitutive procedural approach, which treats
all languages equally by giving them equal recognition, based on a per capita
distribution of resources. This way, bigger languages should receive more resources.
Eventually, only viable languages will survive, and in the rest assimilation will have
to be promoted.
Patten and Kymlicka (2003) have the first collection of works within political
theory directly tackling language justice, though not always using this term. Most
of these authors share a Rawlsian liberal framework. Empirically they mainly
focus on four cases: Canada, the United States, Belgium, and Spain. This book
has been criticized because most of the authors lack an accurate knowledge of
both postcolonial language policy literature and sociolinguistics. The first matters
because in the postcolonial era, waves of mass immigration have transformed some
states, which are no longer associated with a single national language. Similarly,
the second inform us that the world is far more complex than (individual and state)
monolingualism.
The introduction of the book is a relevant contribution to the field for different
reasons. One of the insights is the fact, already mentioned in Kymlicka (1995), that,
as outlined by the introductory chapter, language cannot be handled by analogy with
7 See Sect. 2.5 of this chapter for an explanation of the differences between the principle of
territoriality and the principle of personality.
other “liberal” areas, such as race, class, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Thus, whereas we can easily imagine institutions which are neutral to those issues,
we cannot do the same with institutions which do not favor a language (or a small
set of languages) over others.
A general controversy is the issue of individual vs. collective rights: are language
rights essentially collective rights, or are they rights that individuals can exercise
independently of their community? In general, these authors support the idea that
language rights are individual rights.
Finally, the book also describes the different policy fields subject to linguistic
prescription: access to government services, participation in public and political
debates, employment rights, access to education and health, the situation of
indigenous and immigrant minorities, historical oppression, and language polices
as a tool to promote nationalist policies.
In another work, Patten (2009) surveys the different reasons authors have
provided to justify minority language rights.8 They are normative arguments
based on the premise that “the case for state monolingualism is widely accepted
and fairly compelling.” In fact, he starts by listing the advantages of having a
common language—in other words, the reasons for the state to privilege a single
particular language. Among the bad reasons, there are those linked to the particular
circumstances and interests of the dominant groups and, also, outdated assumptions
about the intrinsic superiority of particular languages, which would contradict
today’s accepted idea that all languages are sufficiently elastic and versatile to
express all sorts of pattern of thought.
However, there are other good reasons (related to the common good), to argue
for state monolingualism. We find most of them in authors such as Van Parijs,
Archibugi, or Barry.
First, to integrate all of its citizens into a common national framework based on a
common language and a common identity
Second, to guarantee equal opportunities to work in the modern economy
Third, to facilitate a deliberative dimension of democracy in the communities
Fourth, to have more efficient institutions which do not spend time or money on
translations nor on simultaneous interpretation
Fifth, to help promoting the welfare state, by generating the necessary solidarity and
social cohesion to provide public goods effectively and reliably
Most of these arguments have been challenged. For example, even if certain
minority language rights are recognized, it is possible (and likely) that the speakers
of that language will be able to speak the majority language as proficiently as to
participate in the society; therefore, a multilingual system could actually be more
efficient (from the perspective of Pareto efficiency) than a monolingual one. On
another front, a common language is not always related to socioeconomic and
8 See also Patten (2014).

Another recent a survey of the normative literature on language policy and
planning is Léger and Lewis (2017).
74 J. Alcalde
political equality. In fact, there are many examples in which convergence on a

common language has done little to improve the socioeconomic opportunities and
political participation of minorities, which often depend on deeper causes than the
state’s language policy.9
Regarding the core part of the article, Patten distinguishes between five different
kinds of language rights:
1. Toleration rights are those protections citizens have against government interfer-
ence with their private language choices in environments, such as their homes,
the realms of civil society, the workplace, etc. According to Patten, it is easy
to justify this kind of language rights because they are normally linked to other
(more accepted) ones, such as freedom of expression, right to privacy, or parental
autonomy.
2. Accommodation rights are designed for people who lack sufficient proficiency
in the dominant language. They mandate positive state action but conditional
on an inability to speak the dominant language. For example, they might imply
the provision of interpreters in a court. This kind of rights is linked to other
entitlements. In the example above, the right to a fair trial.
3. Context-of-choice rights. According to Kymlicka (1995), to be autonomous, a
person needs access to an adequate range of options from which to make choices.
This context of choice will depend on the individual’s societal culture. Due to
the moral interest, all individuals have in the security of their societal culture,
the members of minority cultures are entitled to a set of cultural (and language)
rights to protect (the character of) their societal culture.
As for criticisms to this kind of rights, cosmopolitan authors have questioned
that autonomy depends on access to a societal culture, by arguing that people find
options to choose from a number of cultural materials, even in those which are
not part of their societal culture (and language). Probably, Kymlicka is thinking
in terms of monolingual individuals, and this is an assumption which has been
effectively challenged by authors such as De Schutter or Peled.
Patten argues that the context of choice argument only applies to cases of
vulnerable societal cultures, the ones which offer an adequate range of options
for autonomy, but which are deteriorating. In these cases, minority language
rights for the vulnerable language can help to protect it from deterioration.
Therefore, and relevant from a linguistic justice point of view, the argument does
not recommend minority rights for languages not corresponding to a vulnerable
societal culture, because there is no adequate context of choice present to protect,
in other words, cases of a non-vulnerable societal culture and cases without a
societal culture.
And this is a big limitation, because many minority language communities in
the world do not correspond to societal cultures (e.g., most immigrant groups).
9 See,e.g., Ricento (2015), who presents a collection of (mainly) non-western case studies on
developing countries, where English tends to increase wealth inequality, because it is related to
more opportunities only for the local elite.
The main reasons not to have a societal culture are low numbers, territorial
dispersion, and low socioeconomic status. In these cases, Kymlicka’s argument
would actually defend state monolingualism to encourage minority language
speakers to learn the majority language to improve their context of choice.
4. The end-state argument states that if a particular language is not flourishing,
a language policy should be designed in order to protect that language. That
language needs to be valued by some people, e.g., because it is regarded
as an identity-constituting value, because there is concern with maintaining
intergenerational continuity, etc. Patten is not a big supporter of this argument,
and in general, he follows Rawls to argue that citizens should, in an otherwise
fair context, bear the costs of their own commitments and attachments.
5. Regarding the fairness argumentation, language rights should be determined by
an independently specified conception of fairness. Without them, there would
be unfairness in the social process that determines the availability of minority
language options. According to Pattern, this is the most promising line of
justification for minority language rights. In this subset of fairness arguments,
the author mentions three different positions:
The first one is characterized by authors such as Blake (2003), Barry (2001),
and, in a limited way, even Patten (2003b). They consider that in any society,
language options depend ultimately on millions of uncoordinated choices about
language use that individuals make every day in going about their lives. This
perspective is skeptical about language policies designed to protect vulnerable
languages and would support instead the status quo, as this is what individuals
have chosen. In my opinion, these authors neglect the role of historical processes
of language contact and language shift (including the existence of repression and
violence) in the current configuration of language use. Therefore, sociolinguistic
concepts such as “minorized languages” could not be understood by taking into
consideration only individual choices.
Other authors (e.g., Réaume 2003; Green 1991; Rubio-Marin 2003a, b, or
Peled 2010) argue that language choices are deeply influenced by the incentives
and opportunities offered by social practices and institutions. Particularly rele-
vant is the role of state and government decisions, as they raise the symbolic
and practical value of learning and using some languages and lower the value of
others. From this perspective, a language policy which privileges the use of the
majoritarian language for public communication would be unfair to the speakers
of a minority language who also value their language and would like to use it in
every context of their everyday life to see it survive and flourish. The authors who
support this line of argumentation would prefer instead to implement language
policies that ensure language minority rights aimed at the protection and the
security of their languages.
The third one is the argument advanced by Kymlicka (2001). According to
Patten, this is the most promising line of argumentation, the highest justification
in the scale of language rights (so far), and the last stage in the theorization of
minority rights. The argument is that when engaging in a nation-building process
(i.e., to support a series of policies designed to promote the integration of all
76 J. Alcalde
citizens into a societal culture based on its national culture and identity), the
majority needs to grant extensive minority cultural rights to prevent situations of
injustice. In fact, national minorities should be given the same opportunity than
the majority to engage in minority nation-building.
In the last section, Patten deals with several challenges faced by Kymlicka’s
theory when defining its relationship with fundamental principles of liberal justice
or with the principle of territoriality (in Kymlicka’s view, language rights are always
associated with a territory) or, most importantly, the need for concrete principles to
decide which groups are legitimately entitled to a right to nation-build. According
to Kymlicka, long-established national groups are the ones who deserve such right,
whereas immigrants do not. However, many authors have responded with specific
criteria based on general characteristics, such as size or territorial concentration to
allocate fair rights. Following them, some (large) immigrant groups could be entitled
to more rights than some (tiny) native ones.
To sum up, part of Patten’s (2009) classification of the five kinds of language
rights is derived from the pioneering work by Kloss (1977), who introduced the
distinction between toleration-oriented and promotion-oriented language rights.10
According to Patten, the first includes both toleration and accommodation rights,
whereas the second includes the rest of the categories he identifies: context-of-
choice, end-state, and fairness rights. As Patten says, many disputes about language
rights raise questions that concern promotion-oriented rights.
Musschenga, Albert W. (1998), in a non-frequent view, says that languages have
rights, because they are morally valuable in themselves. Therefore, there is an
intrinsic value in preserving all languages and cultures. The response of the majority
of scholars is that languages and cultures will only matter if they are desired by
individuals, who are the unique bearers of rights. Nevertheless, a language policy
inspired by Musschenga would try to preserve as many languages of as possible.
In fact, he uses the case of the Netherlands to conclude that “the dominant cultural
group should preserve clearly deviant minority cultures which have considerable
intrinsic value.”11
Another relevant typology in this field is the one suggested by Bourhis (e.g.,
Bourhis 2001). Social psychologist Richard Bourhis analyzes what happens in the
society in terms of the language policies which exist in different countries. In a
way, his typology can also be understood as responding to four different theories of
language justice. He situates them in a continuum, which includes pluralism, civism,
assimilationism, and ethnicism. These ideologies are not mutually exclusionary,
and, therefore, it is possible to find the same (liberal democratic) state in different
places of the continuum in each policy issue, such as education or public services.
10 We will talk again about Kloss (1977) when presenting the influential article by Pool (1987) in
the economics section.

11 From a different perspective, other authors that have stressed that language diversity matters per
se are Grin (2011) and Morales-Gálvez.

The Bourhis team has been primarily concerned with western countries. Orig-
inally designed to examine ideologies (and state policies) toward immigrants, it
has also been used in a broader sense to include all minorities. These ideologies
exist as a combination of the state policies and the surrounding public support that
it is deemed were the basis of these policies, which are usually not codified into
constitutional form and are modified over time to reflect the changing circumstances
and attitudes of both the people and the government.
Following pluralism, language minorities should adopt public values of the
dominant majority. This might include the responsibility of all citizens to learn one
(or more) official language(s). However, minorities are free to maintain (private)
individual and native cultural values as long as they are within the wide confines
and boundaries of host laws. Private values include freedom of association in the
linguistic (and cultural and political) spheres but also the freedom for linguistic
minorities to learn and transmit their language. In general, there is a positive view of
minorities, which are considered richness for the society, and therefore, they should
maintain their diverse cultures to the extent that the government would support these
differences financially. Theoretically, this ideology supposes that both (majority and
minority) will transform themselves reciprocally due to sustained contact. However,
sociolinguistics has shown us that the majority language tends to transform (or even
assimilate) more the minority than the other way around (e.g., Laponce 2001). For
example, state policies toward immigrant groups in some Scandinavian countries
would follow this model.
According to civism, different cultural identities and values are allowed, but
not promoted by the host nation in a government policy of nonintervention. This
ideology is similar to pluralism, but here the government does not support them
financially. Actually, in multilingual states, it is translated into the support of the
cultural and linguistic interests of the majority, usually represented by the “neutral”
language of the (unique) nation. From this perspective, survival of the minority
language will depend on the market (i.e., offer and demand), which tends to favor
the dominant language. As an example, the author mentions that in many European
countries and various Latin American ones, the state tends to identify with a
“neutral” language policy.
Assimilationism supports both the adoption of public values by the immigrant
population and some private values of the host nation dominant culture. It normally
dictates a single language in the school system. It encourages voluntary (and
sometimes compulsory) cultural integration. This is expected to happen over time.
By using the (myth of) national unity, assimilationist policies have been designed to
reinforce the loss of minority languages. Examples of this ideology would include
the United States or France.12
12 Dasgupta (2017) suggests that minorities may be more open to assimilation if this includes
measures to secularize or deracialize the public sphere, mitigating this way the ethno-religious
or racial contestation.
78 J. Alcalde
Finally, the ethnicist traditions can be understood as a particular subset of the

assimilationist ideologies. They argue that the state can mandate the whole of public
and private values (including language issues) and make them a precondition to full
citizenship. This ideology makes more difficult for members of language minorities
to be accepted as members of the society, even if they assimilate linguistically
and culturally to the dominant group. In this sense, governments may enact blood
relations requirement or parentage to conditions for citizenship. For example, in
countries like Switzerland, Israel, and Japan, immigrants are not accepted if they
lack the ethnic blood to become full members of the citizenry, and so they can only
be allowed to a lesser status, such as guest worker or second-class citizen.
From this perspective, the state is not pluralist in itself, but only because it is
democratic and responsive to the pressures by the minority groups. Therefore, the
analysis of language policies should evaluate the degree of pluralism (or, in our
vocabulary, language justice)13 of the state in the acceptance of the development
of such language minorities. According to Bourhis, only from a plural vision of
democracy can coexistence and cooperation of all languages be achieved and,
consequently, the self-performance of individuals and groups, which affect the
happiness of mankind. In other words, only through more linguistic justice will
human happiness be achieved. However, as said before, even pluralism may not be
enough to guarantee the ethnolinguistic vitality of the different language groups.
As an attempt to situate some of the main authors in this typology, we could
say that probably Kymlicka would be mostly pluralist, whereas Van Parijs could be
close to civism, with some elements from pluralism and voluntary assimilationism.
In fact, by using the territorial principle, both Kymlicka and Van Parijs would also
argue for language policies not far from certain kind of assimilationism on a small
scale. Maybe Yael Peled, Helder De Schutter, David Robichaud, and such new kind
of proposals would go beyond the pluralist perspective as defined by Bourhis, by
granting language rights even in cases in which there are no significant pressure
from the minority groups.
Réaume, Denise (2003). For this author, language rights are justified on the basis
of collective, rather than individual, rights; in other words, the individual should not
be the unit of the analysis, but the group. In her view, it is the community which is
the subjected to rights and that makes hers an exceptional perspective in a debate
dominated by liberals who argue that it is the individual who is the one entitled to
rights. This would present an added challenge for indicator design because it would
need to establish clearly the boundaries and composition of every particular group.
According to Réaume, collective rights do not depend on the territorial principle.
On the contrary, she tries to use the personality principle, which guarantees
language rights without respect to location, to advocate policies designed to promote
minority languages. Therefore, a personality principle may justify no more (nor less)
protection for a language than any other kind of social division, like religion.
13 Even if he does not use the term linguistic justice, I believe his understanding of the term
pluralism is close to the meaning of linguistic justice by authors such as Kymlicka.

A language policy designed following Réaume’s insights would promote minor-

ity languages, even if they are not geographically concentrated. Therefore, depend-
ing on each empirical case, it would have severe problems of feasibility.
Another author who defends the existence of collective rights is the Canadian
Michel Seymour (e.g., 1994). He justifies the notion of collective rights by using
an anti-individualism perspective; in other words, the premise that the content of a
state policy is, at least in part, determined by the social environment. From this
perspective, he argues that the promotion and protection of certain fundamental
individual rights must require the promotion and protection of community rights.
And one way of doing that is through the constitution, particularly of multinational
states, which should include a charter in which an explicit reference is made to the
collective rights of their founding nations. His final point is the confirmation that
such a charter is not compatible with a policy of (liberal) neutrality by the state. In
other words, and for the purposes of this chapter, linguistic policies that are fair (in
the sense of respect for collective rights) rely on the state playing an active role to
promote and protect such community rights.
A similar perspective, though from law, is presented by Pierre Foucher (e.g.,
2008). In this work, he reviews language rights provided by the Canadian federal
government to its official language minorities, comparing those rights to so-called
traditional human rights as enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. The aim is to
propose ways to improve the collective language rights of Quebec Anglophones in
key domains including the Quebec legislature and the courts, education, government
services, designated institutions, and the private sector. The chapter closes with
key recommendations for improving the judicial status of the English-speaking
communities of Quebec. One of the main ideas is that emphasis should be placed
upon collective rights for the community rather than individual freedom of choice
of language, because it is the collectivity, not the language, which could be at risk.
A second one focuses on the importance of institutions (for the English-speaking
community) to defend its interests and where culture should flourish in all its
diversity.
Rubio-Marin, Ruth (2003a), distinguishes between instrumental and non-
instrumental language rights. The first would be those language rights that are
granted to individuals in order to enable them to enjoy political liberties. An
example of instrumental rights could be the right of people being judged in a trial to
be able to understand the charges against them and to be able to defend themselves,
even if this means employing the services of interpreters and translators. On the
contrary, non-instrumental language rights are those rights designed to offer security
to language communities, ensuring that their language is able to continue to exist,
such as the right to have schools in your language of choice, even if this is not the
dominant language in your community. Rubio-Marín also investigates the different
kinds of measures this distinction entails and advances the idea that language
policies should be placed in a global framework of legal rights, rather than as a
mere regulation.
In another work (2003b), she uses a useful analytical distinction between
immigrants and their descendants, which in my opinion creates an intriguing moral
80 J. Alcalde
puzzle. In her view, even if immigrants have decided to keep their language despite
the fact that it could disadvantage them from a socioeconomic perspective, it should
not be assumed that their children have made the same choice.
May, Stephen. Despite not being a political scientist nor a philosopher, I think
Stephen May deserves a place in this section, as he has closely dialogued within
the political philosophy school. He is a sociolinguist critical of the popular belief
that the nation-state is always linked with the identification of a single official
language. In May (2003b) he argues that the idea that a common citizenship and
a common political space need a common language has been (and still is) used to
justify national monolingualism.
Building from historical sociolinguistics, he shows how, in the era before the
modern nation-state, multilingual communities persisted for generations. Even
today, in large parts of the world, universal or near-universal bilingualism as a
stable situation is the norm and not the exception, including European cases – such
as the Balkans or the most Anglophile nations of Europe: the Netherlands and the
Scandinavian countries. This empirical evidence contradicts most of the authors that
write in the volume edited by Kymlicka and Patten (2003), who seem to think that
bilingualism is either impossible or a step toward assimilation into the dominant
language.
May also criticizes the constitutivist notion that “language must define identity”
as an essentialist and reductionist view. Yael Peled and Helder de Schutter, among
others, will tackle most of these points and develop them further.
In another work (May 2003a), he presents inspiring ideas to strengthen the
arguments for advocating for minority language rights, either from the disciplines
of language ecology or from linguistic human rights. And he does so by addressing
three criticisms to these ideas, which he partially supports. The first one is a
tendency toward essentialism in articulations of language rights. Critics say that
language does not necessarily define who people are and so they are not always
related to their identities. That would mean that language loss is not so bad, because
the persons can adapt to a new language. In this sense, there has been argued
that individuals may well make their language choices on the basis of social class
rather than ethnicity. These are examples of methodological individualism, normally
through rational choice, which cannot capture the collective element of language
use. May’s answer is to understand the complexities of the debates on individual
and collective identities and their associated rights claims. That means accepting
the contingency of language and identity. Thus, while a specific language may
be identified as a significant cultural marker of a particular ethnic group, there is
no inevitable correspondence between language and ethnicity, and there are many
examples of mixed and blurred situations in the real world. However, even if in
theory language may be just one of many markers of identity, in practice, it is often
much more than that. May quotes Bourdieu to conclude that the habitus, including
linguistic habitus, is both a product of early socialization and is also continually
modified by individuals’ perspective. And following Bourdieu he proposes this
concept to explore inequalities in power between dominant and subordinate groups
and finds it useful to understand the language continuum, a dialogical relationship
between linguistic continuity and change, rather than a dichotomous one, presented
by authors from language ecology and linguistic human rights.
The second one is the apparent utopianism and artificiality of “reversing language
shifts” in the face of wider social and political “realities.” Critics say that as much
as the process of language shift and loss is regrettable, there is little that can be
done about it. In fact, May agrees that biological/ecological metaphors can reinforce
such a view. According to him a change of perspective can help to overcome
such criticisms, in other words, to use a sociohistorical/sociopolitical point of view,
rather than a biological/ecological analysis of minority language rights. That means
speaking of the social and political power relations that underlie the question of
language loss (that Skutnabb-Kangas names linguistic genocide). This perspective
provides a counter-argument to criticisms of advocacy of minority language rights.
For example, the idea that such advocacy includes a moral component does not take
into account that all positions that are taken on language and minority rights involve
a moral dimension, reflecting the particular values and ideologies of their exponents.
And the third one is that the individual mobility of minority language speakers
is far better served by shifting to a majority language. This implies that the most
important aspect of language is its instrumental value and so, a rational individual
will end up choosing the majority language in order to have greater economic and
social mobility. This obviously does not take into account the identity dimension of
languages. And all languages include both dimensions: identity and instrumentality.
Also, their respective values change over time (e.g., in Catalonia the minority
language has increased its instrumental value in the recent decades). May goes on by
convincingly pointing to many inconsistencies of the arguments used by the critics
to minority language rights, such as Laitin and Reich (2003).
These ideas have implications for language policy and planning. Therefore, a
fair language policy should address the wider social and political conditions that
have framed most discriminatory language policies. He argues that this perspective
resonates with related research on the ideological influences of language policy,
which should mean a potential for collaboration between different academic
disciplines.
Drawing on political theory approaches, such as Barry (2001) and Van Parijs
(2011a), he argues in a more recent work (May 2014) against opposition to
multilingualism and the related privileging of English as global lingua franca. His
defense of both individual and public multilingualism is grounded in reasons of
linguistic justice, but also because it facilitates wider inclusion. In fact, empirical
evidence by Caminal and Di Paolo (2015) seems to support this idea.14
Pinto, Meital (2007), has an interesting interdisciplinary work, with insights
from three different disciplines: law, political theory, and sociolinguistics. By using
sociolinguistic (and anthropological sources), she presents a constitutivist approach
and argues that culture (and language) is a marker of identity. Culture and identity
14 See the economics Sect. 3.3 of this chapter below.

82 J. Alcalde
are intimately connected to the point that, following the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
people can only experience and express their identity in their own language.
Based on philosopher Joseph Raz’s interest theory of rights, she claims that in
order to decide which minorities should have their language rights granted, the
interests of the different linguistic minorities in protecting their languages should be
comparatively evaluated. Due to the fact that, in general, resources are not unlimited,
the author concludes that the minority that possesses the strongest interest in its
languages should receive the strongest protection.
To present her theory, she examines the case of Israel, which shows the flaws of
Kymlicka’s distinction between immigrant and national minorities. “In the specific
Israeli context, in which the Russian minority constitutes a linguistic minority
that forms a semi-societal culture and has a strong connection to its language,
Kymlicka’s distinction is not relevant.” She uses instead the criteria based on the
strength of the interest in the language. Therefore, because Arabic constitutes an
exclusive marker of the cultural identity of Arab citizens in Israel, they will have
a stronger interest in their language than the Russian immigrants. Accordingly,
more extensive language rights (i.e., support for their language from the Israeli
government) should be granted to the Arabic-speaking minority than to the Russian-
speaking one. However, given the specificities of the Israeli case, even if her main
idea is original and suggestive, I think the potential of this contribution to analyze
other empirical situations could be overestimated.
From a supporting view of linguistic diversity, Ronald Schmidt Sr. (2014)
examines its implications for participatory political theory. According to him,
this implies clear advantages—named as the legitimation advantage, the common
good advantage, and the human-flourishing advantage—but also challenges regard-
ing communication effectiveness, social capital, and socioeconomic and political
inequalities. The essay also offers several suggestions to explore how to address
these challenges.
Rubin (2017) argues that identity-based normative justifications have little
leverage in the political arena and that is why despite normative theorists defend
policies of multilingualism, states remain reluctant to grant recognition and insti-
tutional accommodations to minority languages. For this reason, he presents three
nonidentity justifications of policies of multilingualism: the instrumental dimension
of language (access to multidimensional spaces in the political, social, and economic
spheres), utilitarian aspects about democratic performance, and (liberal) moral
values of equality, empowerment, and access. Concerning policy implications, the
author concludes that the state should only grant recognition to the languages of
substantial minorities (in terms of size or proportion) and regardless of their history
and legacy. Additionally, he defends that the number of official languages should be
expanded while requiring every citizen (including new immigrants) to comprehend
at least one of them. As far as small groups (historic or immigrant) are considered,
and given that the state cannot bear the cost of granting official status to their
minority language, they would not need to abandon their original culture, but their
members would have to learn an official language.
2.4.2 Equalitarian Liberalism
A second relevant school of thought, represented by authors such as Brian Barry or

Philippe Van Parijs, has been sometimes named equalitarian liberalism. They try
to relate language to equality in several ways. Among the different nuances to be
found within this approach, some authors consider that the benefits derived from
maintaining linguistic diversity are higher than those related to achieving linguistic
homogeneity, whereas others think that the opposite is true.
In this perspective language is a hazardous local convention. Following De
Schutter (2007: 4), language is mainly a tool to achieve certain goals, including
allowing communication between individuals and others such as15 :
– Equality of opportunity (Brian Barry and Thomas Pogge)
– Social mobility (Laitin and Reich)
– Absence of violence (Jacob Levy)
– A democratic deliberation process through a common language (John Stuart Mill,
Brian Barry, and Philippe Van Parijs)
This literature also mentions other objectives, such as reducing spatial mobility
of individuals, increasing cohesion and social solidarity, or increasing efficiency. In
fact, one of the first liberal accounts of fairness is closely connected to efficiency.
Utilitarianism says, in simple terms, that “a fair society is a happy society”
(Arnsperger and Van Parijs 2002: 27). From this perspective, we should implement
language policies that maximize aggregate welfare, i.e., the highest utility for the
highest number of individuals. Most of these authors are interested in the effects of
the policy and not in the principles that could have inspired it.
Indeed, those who have focused instead on principles, from Rawls to Dworkin,
from Sen to Nussbaum, have all insisted on the difficulties in measuring the different
utilities that each individual assign to each preference. And this is true in general but
also in the case of language policy in particular. Moreover, we know that even if this
assignment could be done, agreement on the decision is a complex task, which faces
many problems and paradoxes well studied by the scholars of public choice, starting
from the voting paradox of Condorcet.
And even if we assume the feasibility of the assignment of preferences and
the public decision which derives from it, critics have argued that the idea of
maximizing aggregate welfare would need to have some limits regarding our moral
intuitions. For example, it should not be fair to prosecute linguistic minorities, even
if this maximizes the welfare of the society.
As it will be shown, this approach has several strong points. First, it includes
ideas that resonate with other theories of social justice. Second, there is an
emphasis in equalitarianism from a multidimensional perspective. Also, most of
the recommendations can be translated into concrete policies. Therefore, a range of
different goals can potentially be achieved.
15 Most of these authors will be explained in depth in the following pages.

84 J. Alcalde
Liberal equalitarian authors follow Rawls (1971) and his principles of justice
to consider language as an asset, an instrument to achieve a society with higher
socioeconomic and political equality but also with higher equality of opportunities.
This concept of equality was first understood as having civil and political rights.
Later, authors like Barry and others will add socioeconomic rights. From this
perspective, equality is shared by all citizens, and so citizenship needs to be
universal and not multicultural.
One of the current authors who follow Rawls’ theory is Andrew Williams. In
Williams (2011) he deals with the following question: “if a state had to choose
between making its poorest citizens as rich as possible or protecting a particular
language as a primary means of communication in public life . . . would this be a
moral conflict?” He assumes that resources are limited and that linguistic protection
has economic costs, including the greater difficulty for firms to induce highly skilled
foreign workers to relocate there and the lower economies of scale involved in
teaching a minority language. He also assumes that under some conditions there
can be solid reasons to use political means to protect a threatened language, such as
a historical background based on rights violations or distributive injustice.
Following Rawls, Williams argues that in absence of such background, if the
wealth maximinimizing requirement needs to be granted, linguistic protection
cannot be a fair policy. For this reason, those interested in protecting languages
should renounce the maximinimizing requirements that according to Rawls are
necessary to achieve (socioeconomic distributive) justice. Therefore, Williams’ line
of thought is close to those authors who think that socioeconomic equality should
have preference over language equality. From this perspective, a policy designed to
protect a language will most likely be unfair to the least advantaged members of the
society.
According to Bonotti (2017), a Rawlsian perspective on language and linguistic
diversity should include the principle of equal basic rights and liberties, the value of
self-respect, and the principle of fair equality of opportunity. In his view, only the
third one can justify policies of multilingualism, because it is related to democratic
deliberation to identify people’s linguistic identities and preferences about language
policies. As far as these deliberations result in demands for multilingual policies, the
state will have to fulfill them, including various forms of official multilingualism,
such as bilingual education.
Based on Amartya Sen’s capability perspective, Lewis (2017) proposes a
“capability-based approach” to fair and just linguistic conditions. He argues that
certain personal and environmental factors (e.g., implicit social norms and conven-
tions) prevent people from effectively converting their formal resources (e.g., rights,
goods, and services) into opportunities. Accordingly, the effects of such factors
should be tackled through indirect and long-term policy programs rather than direct
and formally administrable remedies. Also Shorten (2017) considers that linguistic
environments can deprive people of capabilities even when they equip them with a
fair share of resources. As an example, he mentions an immigrant worker with only
limited fluency in the majority language, which is enough to securing employment,
but not to participating in politics, accessing medical services, etc. The author is
aware that in order to be applied, this approach needs that a satisfactory list of
capabilities can be agreed upon.
Barry, Brian (2001), presents an (infrequent) pure instrumental view of language.
He believes that linguistic equality is not a positive aim per se. In fact, linguistic
inequality and assimilation could end up in greater equality of opportunity. He
denies the concept of (collective) minority rights and argues that language should
not be a political issue. Therefore, the state should remain neutral, as it remains
neutral in other similar issues, such as religion. By including language issues in
the political agenda, nationalist (conservative) politicians are able to keep social
equality out of it.
According to Barry, our language is a mere local convention, an arbitrary tool
for communication, and so it is not a constitutive aspect of who we are. From
this (pragmatic) perspective, “democratic states have every reason for pursuing
the course that leads to linguistically homogenous polity,” and so, he does not
recommend a language policy that promotes the teaching of minority languages for
(in)efficiency reasons, because they do not have as practical use as other subjects.
Therefore, language policy should aim only at achieving nonidentity-related goals,
such as equality of opportunity or democratic deliberation.
Laitin, David, has studied different aspects of the relationship between language
and conflict, using formal models, statistics, and also extensive qualitative research.
Some of his researches could also be placed in the economics section of this chapter.
In general, he says, “cultural diversity is exciting and beautiful. At the same time,
diversity comes along with all sorts of political difficulties. So, I want to know how
you can sustain diversity and make it politically peaceful” (quoted in Gupta 2011:
20303).
He maintains that, to a certain extent, geography explains multilingualism. In
concrete, data show that there are more languages spoken per square kilometer; the
closer we are to the equator, the higher up we are in the mountains and the longer the
growing season. However, due to the fact that there are no clear causal hypotheses,
this could be a case of correlation without causation. On another front, if we would
like to design a language policy that promotes multilingualism, these findings could
be useful.
When it comes to the decision of learning a language, Laitin has proposed four
different factors:
(a) The main incentive is the expectation of the number of people who are going
to make the same choice, i.e., learning the language. He mentions the failure of
Esperanto, as learning the international auxiliary language only makes sense as
long as there are other people who decide to learn it.
(b) There are also the economic returns for language: the son of (Spanish) non-
Catalan parents realizes that if he learns Catalan he can get a better job, because
Catalans (the out-group) are extremely welcoming of people who made the
effort to learnt Catalan. This would be an incentive.
(c) A third one is called “jungle fever,” and it is related to the possibility of
diminishing your in-group status, within the minority group you are a member
86 J. Alcalde
of: some African Americans may feel that African Americans dating whites are
traitors to their own community. This would be a disincentive.
(d) The last one is status in the out-group, or majority. Even if a member of a
minority group learns the majority language, if people can know that he is not
from the majority group, there will not be any economic return. This would also
be a disincentive.
Accordingly, language policies aiming at encouraging the learning of a language
should take into account these four mechanisms that may become positive or
negative incentives.
Similarly, in other works (Laitin 1997, 2007), he finds that language shift serves
as a compelling measure for cultural assimilation or separation. For example, after
studying the Russians living in the new ex-Soviet republics, he found that the main
reason they decided to learn the (new) national language was (out-group) status.
Thus, they were more likely to learn a language associated with high status (e.g.,
Estonian and Latvian) and less likely to learn the language of other nations, e.g.,
Kazakhstan or Ukraine, which are not associated with high status. From this fact,
we could conclude that in order to promote the learning of a language, we should
implement policies that increase the perceived status associated to the speakers of
that language.
In Laitin (2004) Language Policy and Civil War, he maintains that the decision
of recognizing minority languages does not depend on the degree of attentiveness
of the country toward the ethnic minorities, but on the fact that these countries are
particularly weak. This has direct implications for the concept of linguistic justice,
because, according to him, “the steady increase in state recognition of languages
cannot be interpreted as a trend toward justice; rather it appears to signal a trend
toward state weakness.”
The introduction in the analysis of the variable weak/strong state leads him to
conclude that the official recognition of language diversity has different implications
depending on the country that performs it. For weak states, such recognition is very
risky and might be connected to armed conflict and even civil war. For more stable
states (e.g., West Europe and North America), it will only mean cultural concessions
to powerful minority groups. According to Latin (2004: 183), “states that are weak
(especially those coming out of colonial rule) and groups that can undermine state
power conjoin to yield linguistic recognition and this would explain the correlation
between language concessions and civil war.”
This idea is further developed by taking into consideration the existence of a
strong ethnic group:
(a) In case of weak groups and strong states, there are no civil wars and no linguistic
concessions.
(b) In case of strong groups and weak states, it seems to be both linguistic
concessions and high probabilities of civil war.
(c) In case of strong states beginning to weaken, we might see linguistic conces-
sions but no civil war.
Despite the fact that this work does not include any normative concern, from a
language policy perspective, it nevertheless can be useful. Indeed, these findings
suggest that weak states should be very careful when implementing linguistic
concessions, because in some cases (when there are strong ethnic minorities), this
could lead to violence.
In another work, he accepts linguistic concessions, as long as there is enough
political or social mobilization that demands it. Together with Laitin and Reigh
(2003), Laitin begins by attacking language rights-based conceptions. They divide
liberal normative approaches to language policy in three categories: compensatory
justice, liberal nationalism, and liberal culturalism:
(a) Using the Catalan case as an example, compensatory justice is identified with
the idea that linguistic minority communities are (or have been) the victims
of unjust policies. For this reason, language rights would be justified with the
aim of compensation. However, it could be argued that the number of minority
language speakers that are willing to accept compensation in order to integrate
into the majority community is not clear. If they envision their language as
something of intrinsic value, this undermines claims for compensatory justice.
(b) (Liberal) nationalist scholars understand language policy as a mechanism for
(re)claiming cultural sovereignty or national territorial rights. Language, thus,
is the proof of the existence of a unified nation and its desire to promote its
language. Latin and Reich regard this position as incompatible with liberalism,
since it entails a state authority over people’s freedom to live in the language
they choose.
(c) Liberal culturalism is the position Laitin and Reich associate with Will Kym-
licka, which considers those groups which share an identity as a single entity,
whose rights deserve protection. They point out the difficulties this presents for
the individualistic approach of liberal theory, due to the fact that these groups
do not have a common view about what they want or need.
Having seen the problems of the three liberal approaches to language policy, they
offer a fourth alternative: the prospect of politically negotiated language rights. In
this perspective, language rights depend on the social/political mobilization behind
them. In other words, if a language community is able to mobilize (e.g., electorally)
within a system of democratic decision-making to secure its language rights, then
these rights should be secured. Otherwise (even if criticizing practices such as
the beating of children for using their own language in school), they do not see
any particular liberal contradiction with monolingualist policies. By doing so, they
explicitly advocate for the politicization of language issues, which would be only
limited by general liberal principles of fair behavior toward individuals.
Laitin and Reich use the (positive) examples of Quebec and Spain as places
where political negotiation has secured language rights to the regional minorities.
However, in another work (Laitin 2011), David Laitin has criticized such politiciza-
tion in several cases, including the case of Catalonia. Following William Riker’s
concept of heresthetics, he affirms that politicians use nationalism as a second
dimension of political contestation in order to split the votes of the poor.
88 J. Alcalde
The language policy that follows from Laitin and Reich’s political theory is more
interested at explaining reality (i.e., justifying the status quo) than at changing it
(i.e., improving situations of language injustices).
In another work (Laitin 2013), he mentions a previous research in which he
argued that the language policy of the EU should follow the Indian model, the so-
called 3+/−1 language system. This is said to be a multicultural and multilingual
equilibrium: English as the language for business, Hindi as the Indian (so-called
cultural) language, and a third one depending on the state you are from. Then, you
might need a fourth one if you are from an ethnic minority, or it may also be the
case that the official language in your state is Hindi. In that case you will only
need two languages: English and Hindi. In my opinion, this approach improves
from other political theory analysis because it admits (and even is based on) the
fact (extensively shown in sociolinguistics) that an individual can be bilingual
and trilingual and it implicitly recognizes that this fact is more the norm than
the exception.16 On the negative side, it does not address the fundamental justice
question presented by a situation in which some people need to learn two languages
to be fully integrated in society, whereas others need three and others four.
In the European Union, the application of this logic gives us a 2+/−1 language
system. According to Laitin, “the language of Europe is English.” Then, if you are
not a native English speaker, you will need to learn the official language of your
country, e.g., Spanish in Spain. If you are a member of an ethnic minority, you
might need a third one, e.g., Catalan in the Catalan region of Spain. He simply
says that this is what it is increasingly happening now (and so eventually will be
the future) in the EU, a system or language repertoire “which everybody shares
and everybody understands.”17 Implicitly, he seems to say: “and this is the right
(and most efficient) way of dealing with the language issue.” From this perspective
language policy in the EU should promote English in every country plus the national
language. In cases where a minority (concentrated in a territory) has a language of
its own, this language should also be protected and promoted. To sum up, these
recommendations are not very different from Van Parijs’ proposals.
When it comes to the economic side of his work, in an interview in 2009, Laitin
explained his research on whether multilingualism at the state level was associated
with poverty (Tordera 2009). In particular his research question was “if in a well-
established state you give linguistic autonomy to a region, what is the expected
loss on GDP?” Since the empirical evidence he found was negative (there was
no expected loss on GDP associated to linguistic concessions), he does not longer
believe that multilingualism is necessarily associated with lower economic growth.
This finding could support language policies designed to promote multilingualism
in a community or in a state.
16 “Language has special appeal”—he says—“because unlike religion or race, it is cumulative. You
do not have to give up Somali to learn English, but you must give up Christianity to become a
Muslim” (quoted in Gupta 2011: 20301).
17 See Peled (2015) for a more developed concept of language repertoire.
Another of Laitin’s works related to linguistic justice and language diversity is

Laitin (2011), a presentation given in Barcelona, based mainly on his research about
the case of Catalonia and on a formal model which uses the case of Norway. In
this work, he reminds us that sociolinguists have modeled the rapid decline in the
number of world languages, fearing the loss of linguistic diversity in the world. At
the same time, other scholars have shown how globalization has made English the
focal language of economic mobility. This, in turn, is provoking the improvement of
the socioeconomic conditions of educated people in many countries, who will learn
English precisely to take advantage of the economic returns of learning English.
Laitin’s model argues that as long as this process goes on, i.e., wealth increases
in a globalized world, whereas highly educated people have consumption choices,
these highly educated people will invest in such education for their children that
will sustain their own language, and therefore, they will sustain world linguistic
diversity. His statistical findings show a bigger support for his hypothesis in small
countries, such as Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, or Israel, than in big countries,
such as Germany, Poland, Spain, or Turkey. In conclusion, from a language policy
point of view, a good way of ensuring (some degree of) linguistic diversity is to
promote the teaching/learning of English. Indirectly, through the creation of wealth
for those (highly educated) native speakers of other language different from English,
an incentive to promote linguistic diversity will also be created, together with the
necessary resources to implement it.
After exploring the situation of the Spanish language in the United States,
Thomas Pogge (2003) criticizes Kymlicka’s advocacy of minority language rights
and defends a strong monolingual national policy. In his view, historical injustices
are irrelevant to Spanish language policy, because it is impossible to differentiate
between those who we could name newcomers (recent immigrants from the
Hispanic community) and oldcomers (people who descend from those present in
the United States at the time when its borders were extended).
He also claims that linguistic inequality does not entail an injustice from a liberal
point of view, because it is based on different choices that different individuals have
made. Thus, such inequality ends up in a greater equality along a more important
(nonlinguistic) dimension, which is equality of opportunity. For example, when
thinking about education, what matters to him is to offer the best education for each
child. In the US context, this leads him to believe that the English-only education,
and therefore monolingual English policies should be pursued, particularly in the
field of education.
Similar to Blake, Jacob Levy (2003) contends that the death of a language is not
necessarily related to an injustice. His argument has to do with the costs associated
with acquiring literacy. Different from other authors trained in political theory, Jacob
Levy is aware that multilingualism is a feature of many language communities.
Building from this fact, he claims that linguistic assimilation occurs because the
cost of becoming literate in multiple languages is higher than the cost of becoming
fluent in a single foreign language.
According to Levy, many modern languages were constructed as unions of
diverse dialects, in order to have access to a wider society. Therefore, this way
90 J. Alcalde
of building a competitive linguistic community would be a form of cultural self-

defense, which has occurred in history spontaneously. However, it could be argued
that phenomena of language construction by merging dialects are the result of a
designed policy and not as spontaneous as Levy claims.
For him, living the entire life in a language of limited scope is expensive,
because it limits its speakers from opportunities for personal advancement. From
this perspective, language should not be a prison, and children should not be tools
in the maintenance of unsustainable sociological divisions. Linguistic diversity,
therefore, will decrease naturally. Some of these arguments resemble Patten (2003a)
when he tries to distinguish between the lost causes and the languages which are
viable.
In a previous work (Levy 2000), this author analyzes the relationship between
language and conflict by suggesting a certain type of multiculturalism. First of
all, he accepts that language is connected to the identity of a person. However,
when designing a language policy, nonidentity aims should be more important
than identity issues. Particularly, according to him, we should design cultural and
linguistic policies in such a way as to avoid violence, cruelty, or humiliation. And
these policies should be based in providing minorities those language rights that will
contribute to the formation of intercultural frameworks that can mitigate interethnic
conflicts (i.e., those conflicts which result from interactions between minority and
majority groups in multilingual societies).
Some of the most original contributions to this field have been proposed by
Philippe Van Parijs.18 This author sees linguistic justice as part of a necessary
global solidarity, which would be built with the help of a universal basic income.19
In concrete (and among other purposes), this instrument would serve to correct
the inequality of opportunity. Based on two controversial assumptions, his main
language policy recommendation combines the promotion of English internationally
and the protection of certain languages through the territoriality principle: (a)
assuming that English is already de facto the global lingua franca, it should be
further promoted; and (b) assuming that the world is characterized by linguistically
unified territories, the territoriality principle should guarantee language rights to
dominant groups in homogeneous territories.
In Van Parijs (2011a), this author offers three different interpretations of linguis-
tic justice.
(a) As a fair cooperation, language is considered as a public good. The problem
is the unfair sharing of the burden of producing such a public good (i.e.,
English). Among the solutions the philosopher suggests poaching on the web
as compensatory free riding. In other words, to counterbalance the economic
advantage of the English natives, those with a different mother tongue will
have free access to English content in the Internet. Moreover, English natives
18 See, e.g., Van Parijs (2000a, b, 2003a, b, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2011a, 2013, 2015, 2016).
19 For the idea of linguistic justice connected to EU-wide institutionalized social policy, see Van
Parijs (2016).
will remain monoglots as opposed to the rest of the world, and that is also
a disadvantage. With the expansion of English in the long term, however, the
problem would wither away. As everyone would be able to speak fluently the
language, there would be no advantages for the English natives.
(b) As equality of opportunities, language is considered as capital, an asset, a
productive skill. The problem is the native English-based multidimensional
advantage. The author creates a new category of people, the linguistically
handicapped, who face an inequality of opportunity due to the fact that
their mother tongue is not English. Among the solutions, Van Parijs (who in
other works had suggested a specific tax to compensate those linguistically
handicapped) uses his idea of a universal basic income. He also proposes a ban
on dubbing and the virtuous circle of dissemination (i.e., language immersion
in the school, etc.), so that in the long term, the disadvantage is reversed.
(c) As equal dignity, language has symbolic value. The problem is that those
who are not proficient in English will suffer from an absence of recognition
of their dignity. As far as the solution is concerned, we should apply the
linguistic territoriality principle (which somehow contradicts his big support
toward fostering a lingua franca). According to Van Parijs, we would then
achieve respect for every language which is official in each territory by the
principle of reciprocity, ensuring the survival (at least in the short term) of those
languages and also the pacification of linguistic conflicts. This solution faces
other challenges when it comes to setting the (necessarily arbitrary) borders
of the territories, but also in terms of its implementation. Nevertheless, the
long term again minimizes this problem, because we are heading toward the
vanishing of linguistic identities.
According to Van Parijs, linguistic diversity based on the principle of territoriality
is “the firmest and increasingly the only serious” protection for cultural diversity.
First, it is a stabilizer of the population. Second, it avoids disruption of little
communities, and by doing that it stops socioeconomic solidarity, given that the
self-identification with the language of the territory favors social cohesion. Third,
it avoids linguistic conflicts in multilingual territories, such as segregation in
education or the inequalities derived from the different linguistic uses in a territory.
Finally, the most important benefit is the fact that in each territory, there would be
an adequate language for the process of democratic deliberation in equal conditions.
However, it can be argued that frequently we find territories where different
languages are spoken. In multilingual territories, those linguistic minorities, which
do not feel the official language of their territory is their language, would not have
linguistic recognition.
In Van Parijs’ theory, a big cost for the citizens (in the short term) is the
learning of the lingua franca, necessary to achieve a better communication outside
the territory. And this is the main basis for the economic inequality in the
communications with the natives of the territory where the lingua franca is spoken.
That is why such inequality should be compensated by the speakers of the lingua
franca in order not to act as free riders, because they would also benefit from
92 J. Alcalde
communications with the rest of the citizens from other territories without effort
nor cost to learn the language.
With the extension of the global lingua franca, high-skilled workers (those who
are proficient in the lingua franca) would tend to migrate toward territories where
the lingua franca is spoken. In different works, Van Parijs has faced this issue
through different mechanisms, including a fiscal system favorable to those high-
skilled workers, a language tax to be paid by the territories where the lingua franca
is spoken but also by poaching the web (e.g., Jstor). However, we have to keep in
mind that this would be a temporary situation, because in the long run, learning
the lingua franca would have a much-reduced cost and so it would be available for
everyone.
As we will see when examining authors such as De Schutter or Peled, this
perspective has been highly criticized. For example, recent compilations of articles
have also challenged Van Parijs’ ideas, such as De Schutter and Robichaud (2015),
to which he has responded by clarifying his claims and making some concessions
(Van Parijs 2015). In the first place, several authors, such as Sue Wright and
Stephen May, emphasize sociolinguistic complexities which are absent in Van
Parijs’ analysis. Van Parijs accepts the criticism, but he argues that even if he accepts
most of them, this does not invalidate the main points of his analysis.
Wright (2015) considers that in the era of globalization and linguistic superdi-
versity, current theoretical tools do not allow us to grasp transnational language
practices and patterns of contact, which are more function driven than in the past.20
In order to understand them, a new linguistic paradigm is needed, one beyond
the conception of language as a system related to national monolingualism and its
divisions.
May (2015), like Bauböck (2015), emphasizes the symbolic and identity func-
tions of language. Moreover, in the same line than Laponce (2015), May argues
that Van Parijs ignores issues of power and inequality, including those related to
the different English language varieties. He also affirms that Van Parijs’ conception
of linguistic territoriality does not face linguistic hierarchies already taking place.
Most importantly, May stresses the idea that Van Parijs’ monolithic view of English
does not correspond with a world where many different Englishes coexist. Due to
each of them has a different status and communicative uses, access to them cannot
be linked to social and economic mobility, as Van Parijs has suggested.
On another front, Robichaud (2015) refines the cooperative justice argument by
pointing out that if we accept English as the inevitable global lingua franca, the
contribution by native Anglophones is not needed and so they are free to benefit
from the system without paying any cost. Otherwise, if the configuration of the
(future) global linguistic regime is unclear, he proposes particular benefits that
would only be accessible to native Anglophones through cooperation, i.e., through
contributing to the creation of English as a global lingua franca. This way the
20 About superdiversity, see also Marácz (2014).

cooperative justice argument is amended so that native Anglophones share the cost
of those deciding to learn English to improve their social and economic chances.
As it might be difficult to objectively determine individual interests in languages,
the same author in another work (Robichaud 2017) builds on the notion of market
failures—both insufficient information and externalities—to justify coercive and
state language policies to make speakers equal. In his view, allowing individuals to
choose which language to learn, speak, and transmit is bound to produce suboptimal
results, whereas choosing a collective strategy democratically about the medium of
instruction, language in the workplace and other social domains, could help solve
such market failures.
Van Parijs’ petition to accelerate the dissemination of the lingua franca is
challenged by Réaume (2015). From a theoretical point of view, she criticizes the
understanding of equality by rational choice approaches based on the democratic
benefits of linguistic uniformity. On the one hand, a focus on equality of opportunity
and social mobility through lingua franca competence does not take into consider-
ation the long-term consequences for nonnative communities. On the other hand,
even if the idea of compensating the losers of the competition between languages
can increase the level of equal opportunity for individuals, this will happen at the
expense of increasing the inequality among language communities.
Stilz (2015) affirms that Van Parijs lacks a convincing account of why global
English poses a threat to parity of esteem for other linguistic communities. She
offers the argument that it does so only because background power inequalities
are driving its adoption. She also argues that official multilingualism provides a
superior approach than linguistic territoriality to managing linguistic heterogeneity.
In a similar vein, Weinstock (2015) challenges Van Parijs’ assumption that most sit-
uations in which smaller languages are threatened by larger ones can be assimilated
to “colonial cases,” in which there is a clear injustice as between the two linguistic
groups. Moreover, he argues that the amount of coercion that would have to be
applied even within linguistically defined territories in order to avoid the erosion
of the smaller language has been underestimated. Van Parijs (2015) responds that
in his view even in cases without political or economic oppression, the fact that
speakers of the stronger language do not learn (and use) the language of the local
community can be considered as a deviation from justice as parity of esteem. And
he complements this idea by aligning himself with Patten’s (2014: 225) “hybrid
thesis,” i.e., a position that tries to combine both the recognition of every (native)
language present in a territory and the (coercitive) support of the locally dominant
language.
Laponce (2015) agrees with the two main arguments by Van Parijs in favor of
English as the global lingua franca and in favor of the territorial protection of the
languages of minority nations, but for different reasons. About the first one, he does
not think that English as a lingua franca will be a matter of justice; however, it has
to be done for reasons of convenience. So, for the purposes of this chapter, despite
his coincidental agreement with Van Parijs, Laponce acknowledges that this mean
being unfair to nonnatives. About the second one, he grounds territorial protection
as a fundamental right of national self-determination. Similarly, Bauböck (2015)
94 J. Alcalde
argues that Van Parijs’ theory does not take into account the value of language as
an instrument for political self-government. According to him, a universal right of
individuals to membership self-governing polities would increase egalitarian global
justice, which would help to defend coercive territorial language regimes.
According to Wickström (2016a), the solution by Van Parijs is connected to
domain losses in other languages and the development of diglossia, as well as to
unintended welfare effects of changes in language use due to changed perceptions
and possibilities. The other languages will no longer serve to discuss themes related
to the lost domains.
According to García (2016), Van Parijs misses to address the legitimacy issue.
That is, any language regime needs to be acceptable to and be supported by a
majority of the citizens. From this perspective, it is relevant to decide the boundaries
of the political community at which the expression of citizens’ preferences should
be measured. In her view, there is not enough empirical data available on citizens’
language regime preferences, so we cannot know if a particular language regime is
accepted or not by the citizens.
Contrary to Van Parijs, Marácz (2016) argues that languages and multilingual
communication are relevant for the development of Social Europe. Thus, in the
current unfair situation, there is a European elite who speaks a European variety
of global English, whereas half of the EU citizens do not have any knowledge of
English at all. On the one hand, decontextualized English cannot mediate between
the different political cultures in Europe that are rooted in language, as defended by
Barbier (2013, 2014). On the other hand, an English-only policy would privilege
those higher educated and better-off in Europe (as argued by Gazzola 2014b),
challenging this way a more equalitarian Social Europe. Marácz concludes that
in order to overcome this situation, we need a neutral, transparent, and accessible
lingua franca. Probably Van Parijs would agree with that conclusion and add that this
needed lingua franca is precisely the English that we already have. And probably
Marácz would respond that his argument is actually that English is not neutral,
transparent, and accessible enough.
Morales-Gálvez (2016) considers that a fast expansion of English is connected
to the globalization of an Anglo-American life-world that impoverishes global
democracy. From this perspective, language diversity matters (as argued by Grin
2011), as it helps to preserve different moral opinions, something needed in a
meaningful democratic-deliberative process. If the solution proposed by Van Parijs
is implemented, the author concludes it might be that more voices could be heard,
but with less substantial diversity of opinions.
Using the example of the Catalan case, Castaño (2006) has proposed a modified
version of Van Parijs’ theory, by suggesting a territorial multilingualism based
on a non-pure application of the territorial principle. The idea is that we do not
need to limit the official languages in a territory to a just one because linguistic
substitution can be avoided in other ways. The aim has to be to find an equilibrium
between (some of) the languages in a territory, not all of them, because this would
be impossible in practice. This theory argues for a multilingualism of the whole
population based on the territorial principle: the inhabitants of a territory should
know the minority language of that territory (e.g., Catalan) the “local” lingua franca
(also understood as the majoritarian language, i.e., Spanish) and the global lingua
franca as a third language, i.e., English.
Stojanovic, Nenad (2011), defends the proposal of a single federal electoral
district for Belgium, first suggested by Deschouwer and Van Parijs (2009)21
and which also mentions Dave Sinardet (2011). Stojanovic’ chapter deals with a
particular aspect of the proposal: the linguistic quota system (i.e., reserved seats for
language groups).22 According to Deschouwer and Van Parijs, “in the absence of
quota many voters will be reluctant to support a politician from the other language
group for fear of contributing to a reduction in the representation of their own group
in the Parliament.”
For Stojanovic, this aspect of the proposal creates two problems: one is related
to legitimacy and the other one to non-territorial quotas. The first one is illustrated
by the fact that, potentially, French speakers alone could decide who would occupy
the Flemish quota and vice versa. About the second one, his research has shown
that, as a general rule, such quotas should be avoided in free and democratic
liberal societies, which attribute individual rights on the basis of territorially linked
citizenship and of membership in non-territorially defined groups.23
Inspired by the Swiss case, Stojanovic proposes three amendments to the Pavia
Group proposal. In order to solve the legitimacy problem, he suggests using a
formula of geometric mean to fill the seats reserved for each region. Secondly, he
advocates for linguistic balance by introducing territorial (instead of linguistic non-
territorial) quotas on the basis of the three existing regions. Finally, he proposes
the use of a majoritarian instead of a proportional electoral system, which would
complement the other two suggestions.
From a language policy perspective, these suggestions follow Van Parijs’ main
ideas. For example, it reflects a clear belief in the linguistic territorial principle
for Belgium (and potentially for the EU), which has been criticized by Helder de
Schutter (2008) and David Robichaud (2011) among others.
Sinardet, Dave, starts from Habermas’ democratic theory and his concept of
public sphere as a prerequisite for democratic legitimacy. Sinardet quotes Fraser
to explain this idea: “Democracy requires the generation, through territorially
bounded processes of public communication, conducted in the national language
and relayed through the national media, of a body of national public opinion”
(Fraser 2007:7). The challenge is to apply the concept of public sphere to a
21 This text is also known as the Pavia Group proposal. The Pavia Group is made up by a group of
intellectuals, who aim at providing concrete solutions for linguistically heterogeneous polities such
as Belgium or the European Union. The group is coordinated by Philippe van Parijs, and its name
stems from the place where its members gather: Van Parijs’ house in the Pavia Street in Brussels.
See www.paviagroup.be.
22 In a book originally written in the form of nine philosophical dialogues, this author has studied
extensively the possibility of using quotes in public policies dealing with linguistic diversity. See
Stojanovic (2013).
23 See Stojanovic (2008).
96 J. Alcalde
multilingual democracy, such as Belgium or the EU, both composed of linguistically

differentiated communities. Sinardet has done research on the media’s role in the
Belgian federal system, showing that there are no pan-Belgian media, but only
those aiming at the Flemish-speaking population and those aiming at the French-
speaking one. Moreover, Belgian politicians tend to focus on topics that matter to
the members of the language group they belong to. Similarly, at the EU level, media
are national-based, and politicians tend to focus on their national constituencies. In
fact, this absence of a European public sphere is frequently linked to the democratic
deficit of the EU.
According to Sinardet there are two ways of solving this problem. One would
be to have a pan-European media available across the entire EU territory, but this is
unrealistic in the absence of a common language—he says that “English cannot (yet)
be considered the lingua franca of all of its social classes and geographical areas”
(p. 312). The second way would be through the Europeanization of national public
spheres and accordingly of national media reporting. In order to do so, and given
that “media need politicians that are relevant to their audience, whereas politicians
need media that are relevant to their electorate” (p. 318), he argues for an electoral
reform to create a European-wide constituency as a necessary condition for the
development of a genuine public sphere. This is basically an application to the EU
of his own solution originally thought for the Belgian case.24
In sum, given the unfeasibility of having a common language, he proposes an
indirect way to achieve a public sphere: an electoral reform. From a language policy
point of view, he seems to suggest keeping doing politics in the vernacular—at least
until English becomes the European lingua franca—but promoting a change in its
content toward a more European approach.
An unorthodox criticism of English as a lingua franca comes from Peter Ives
(2010). He has written extensively about Gramsci’s approach to the politics of
language. More recently he has analyzed the phenomenon of English as a global
language from a Gramscian perspective. As it is known, the Italian philosopher
wrote several articles in which he criticized Esperanto. According to Ives, the
criticism was not about the language per se, but about the idea of (the need of)
a universal or world language. Therefore, the same criticism could be applied
to English today and the theoretical perspectives by authors, such as De Swaan,
Archibugi, or Van Parijs, who recommend the use of English as a lingua franca,
as the fairest solution to the language problem. Following Gramsci, Ives criticizes
them because they have forgotten that “the communicative function of language is
inextricable from the cultural questions.” According to Gramsci (and to Ives), the
need for a world language presupposes class and cultural inequalities. In Gramsci’s
words: “The advocates of a single language are worried by the fact that while the
world contains a number of people who would like to communicate directly with
24 Sinardet is a member of the Pavia Group, chaired by Van Parijs, who has developed several
proposals to reform Belgium from an institutional point of view. One of these proposals includes
the introduction of a federal electoral district to elect part of the federal representatives.
one another, there is an endless number of different languages which restrict the
ability to communicate. This is a cosmopolitan, not an international anxiety, that of
the bourgeois who travels for business or pleasure, of nomads more than of stable
productive citizens. They would like artificially to create consequences which as yet
lack the necessary conditions . . . (Gramsci 1987: 27).” From this, Ives constructs
the notion of linguistic hegemony to contribute to the debate about English as an
international language by claiming such hegemony is not neutral, but has cultural
(and socioeconomic) effects: “When and where English as a second language was
taught primarily in private schools or is limited to children of the middle-class and
wealthy, it becomes a crucial element of an international business class structure.
It facilitates the growth and spread of multinational corporations and trade” (Ives
2006: 136–137).
In a recent work (Ives 2014), he argues that dominant approaches within political
theory to language justice and language rights assume individualistic and instru-
mentalist conceptions of language, related to liberal authors such as John Locke. He
suggests scholars should explore other theoretical perspectives, including Antonio
Gramsci, Valentin Voloshinov, and Mikhail Bakhtin. In a similar vein, Thomas
Ricento (2014) explores the underlying linguistic conceptions of (liberal) political
theorists. In particular, he argues that most of the views on the terms “language” and
“culture” from normative political theorist are connected to particular conceptions
of the nation-state that consider language as something stable and mainly used for
communicative purposes while ignoring several facts about language inequalities.
For example, he stresses that speakers of nonstandard varieties of languages
(including English as a lingua franca) are socially marginalized because of their
speech variety, which has consequences on their employment perspectives and
citizenship rights. Ricento advocates for multidisciplinary approaches that include
awareness and acknowledgment of the different disciplines to develop common
ways of rethinking concepts such as language rights.
Fleurbaey, Marc (2011), argues that the replacement of English by Esperanto as
a lingua franca would have two negative effects: First, the distribution of individual
well-being would have higher costs than gains. According to him, an artificial
language needs to be learnt by all,25 and despite some people would gain in the
operation because Esperanto is simpler than English and because access to the labor
market would be more equal, the gains would be small compared to the cost endured
by the Anglophones who must learn Esperanto. For this reason, he will end up his
text by recommending the promotion of English as the international language.
However, the whole chapter revolves around a second effect of adopting
Esperanto as the international language. According to Fleurbaey, English would
have its status reduced, and no other natural language would increase its own. This
is what Fleurbaey calls levelling down: “the special pride of being a native speaker
25 Most likely this author is not aware of the sociolinguistics of Esperanto, such as the existence of
Esperanto speakers.
98 J. Alcalde
of the lingua franca disappears without being replaced by a new pride for the
others” (p. 231).
Fleurbaey’s philosophical argument is that levelling down can be good in some
respect. And he claims that he can prove it by admitting that Esperanto would be
fairer than English in terms of neutrality. Therefore, Esperanto could be a case
for levelling down. The logic is the following: equality of status is desirable and
can only be obtained by levelling down.26 However, he argues that this is a small
advantage overridden by efficiency considerations and that is why English should
still be chosen over Esperanto.27
In my opinion, apart from other minor flaws, the main problem of this chapter is
that it is based on a wrong assumption: adopting Esperanto would not be a case of
levelling down, but the opposite. If Esperanto was adopted, there would be language
equality at the international level between all natural languages of the world. In that
situation, language status would increase, especially among minority languages.
In fact, and considering the easiness of Esperanto, it could be argued that global
efficiency would increase immensely, given that potentially every person of the
world would have a chance of feeling such pride of being able to speak (proficiently)
the lingua franca. Therefore, this would actually be an argument for Esperanto, not
only from a fairness sense of neutrality but also from a Pareto efficiency point of
view.
Archibugi, Daniele, is a political theorist who has written extensively about
cosmopolitan democracy. Within this perspective he argues for linguistic cosmopoli-
tanism which in practice means to promote the use of English at a global scale. He
criticizes Kymlicka’s notion that democratic politics has to be carried out in the
vernacular by arguing that instead democratic politics must be in Esperanto. It is
worth to mention that he uses “Esperanto” as a metaphor for a universal language.
He seems to like the Esperanto ideal, but he considers it to be unrealistic: “Of
course I do not advocate the use of Esperanto, but rather the idea that it is the
responsibility of individuals and governments to remove the language barriers that
obstruct communication” (Archibugi 2005b: 545). So in his view, today’s Esperanto
would actually be English.
26 In his view, it is harder to defend an inequality-generating Pareto improvement in the case of
symbolic status, such as language status, than in the case of (individual) well-being. To make his
point, he uses the example of a situation in which Esperanto is the lingua franca and is the mother
tongue of no particular people of the world. In that situation, it would make no sense to replace
Esperanto by Flemish on the grounds that it would give the people in Flanders a special symbolic
status and a unique pride, without changing anything to the status and lack of pride of any other
people.
27 According to the author, there are other (minor) aspects to consider. One is the fact that if
Esperanto was chosen, the Esperanto community would take great pride. Fleurbaey says that
this effect would be limited to the generation that defended Esperanto and by the possibility of
creating another language more neutral than the one initiated by Zamenhof. Another one takes into
consideration the interactions between native speakers and nonnative speakers of the lingua franca.
Fleurbaey thinks that with an artificial language, inequalities in proficiency may be more reflective
of unequal talents.
For him, democracy is composed by two phases: in the first one, dialogue and
persuasion, is the basis of a deliberative, discursive, or communicative dimension
of democracy; in the second one, an aggregation of preferences takes place, in
which the competitive arguments of political parties prevail. From this perspective,
communication is essential to democracy. Interestingly, other authors who favor
English as an international language, such as Patten (2003b) or Lacey (2015), do
not think that a common public language is necessary for deliberative democracy.
In a couple of articles and in a chapter of his book, Archibugi analyzes four
different situations where language political choices are needed: First, the case
of the Spanish-speaking students in state schools in California. In this case, he
recommends teaching everything in English because this is the “dominant language
in the country in which they live and also the dominant lingua franca worldwide.”
At the same time, he mentions that other policies should also be included, which
we could label as symbolic, such as having some courses of Spanish to English-
speaking students or adopting baseball as the sport to play in such schools. In
general, it seems a very similar perspective to Van Parijs’.
Second, he presents Zamenhof’s own case of Białystok. After considering
unfeasible the most cosmopolitan of all solutions, i.e., Esperanto—designed to place
the various communities on the same plane and to enable them to communicate
with all the citizens of the world—he suggests creating bilingualism in Russian and
German, allowing and developing the private use of other vernacular languages.
According to him, Zamenhof would have agreed to Van Parijs’ proposal to
institute compensations from the linguistic communities not required to study other
languages.28 Third, when it comes to the case of India’s language policies, he
suggests investing more in education in English alongside local languages to make
English the intranational and international lingua franca, even if this means that
many of the local languages are probably lost. And fourth, about the European
Parliament, he suggests leaving just two languages, English and French, and placing
all members on the same plane, asking the English to speak in French and the French
(and most likely everyone else) to speak in English.
In general, he recommends the implementation of compulsory education pro-
grams in the countries of the “civilized world” (including the EU), which enable
students to learn properly (in) English and (in) their own mother tongue. According
28 “The fact that Zamenhof’s solution was unworkable should not prevent us from admiring its
grandiose ambition, whereby a local problem was intended to provide the thrust for a universal
language” (Archibugi 2005: 549). In this regard, Esther Schor (2015) argues that Zamenhof bridged
the gap between liberal and communitarian political philosophy. Building from the classical
typology by Tönnies between Gemeinschaft (i.e., community) and Gesellschaft (i.e., society) and
from Mark Fettes’ observation that what Zamenhof had in mind was to create “Gemeinschaft on
a global scale,” Shor analyzes Zamenhof’s project in terms of creating an ethical community by
choice, as individuals of conscience. This would entail a liberal element, as long as he situated
Esperanto within the realm of human rights, something the whole movement has embraced. But
also a communitarian one, captured by the so-called inner idea of his international neutral language,
which has given Esperantists a cosmopolitan collective identity. On Esperanto’s cosmopolitanism,
see also Kim (1999), Nagai (2010), and Tonkin (2016).
100 J. Alcalde
to him, “an enlightened social policy must attempt to make the illiterate polyglot”
(2005b: 553).
Weinstock, Daniel (2003). According to this author, a fair language policy should
be composed of three principles:
(a) Minimalism. Language policy should have one main objective: effective com-
munication. All the other possible goals (nation-building, cultural preservation,
political unity) are subordinated to this one. In case of interference, what matters
is communication.
(b) Anti-symbolism. The selection of a particular language by the state should not
have a symbolic significance. In other words, it should be neutral and not
attached to a particular identity.
(c) Revisability. The state should be prepared for modifying its language policies,
particularly in cases of demographic change.
This set of policy prescriptions will generally favor the dominant language,
and it will do so for reasons of pragmatism and linguistic justice, as justice
here is understood as the maximization of communication. Therefore, linguistic
inequality ends up in greater equality along a nonlinguistic dimension, which is
communication. Thus, a language policy designed following Weinstock’s principles
will tend to support (and justify) the status quo in a similar way to Van Parijs’ theory.
In a recent work (Weinstock 2014), he argues that liberal states should have
language policies that adequately manage language conflicts which arise from a
context of state neutrality and multiple and conflicting sets of interests in our
societies: (a) the individuals instrumental and identity dimensions, (b) the state’s
need to (certain) homogeneity to carry out its functions, and (c) the human wish
of preserving diversity. In his view, even if there are reasons of justice to conduct
coercive policies in situations where a clear injustice is present, the justification of
such policies in other cases should be related to solving collective action problems.
Mainly developed as a critique to Van Parijs (2011a), Joseph Lacey (2015) argues
that it is not clear that English will inevitably become a global lingua franca—
although he says that if one day there is a common universal language, the only
possibility would be English. One of the reasons is that in poorer parts of the
world, the spread of English may find an obstacle when confronted with a large
portion of the population which is not well educated or professionally employed.
Also, the intensity of the interaction between individuals without competence in
English and those who speak it could be so low that the maxi-min dynamic would
not work. Moreover, protected national borders could represent labor restrictions
which would complicate the opportunities of people to learn English. Furthermore,
there are sociological impediments to language learning, including lack of time,
motivation, or the cost. The last of Van Parijs’ proposals is the ban on dubbing and
also presents complexities which means that in the end, the assumption that most of
the world’s poor will have regular access to English language media is questionable
and, in fact, questioned.
Interesting is the fact that, according to him, the absence of a lingua franca is not
an insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of transnational justice. Taking as an
example the case of Switzerland, he argues that a multilingual demos can function
well. In fact, he says that the EU as a political entity has achieved significant
cross-border identifications despite its linguistic diversity, an argument which I find
fragile, as it could be that these “significant cross-border identifications” were not
too significant, after all.
Following these two ideas, he concludes by affirming that there is little justifica-
tion for artificially accelerating the universalization of English, because that would
imply implementing policies which are both unfair to the poor and disrespectful
to non-Anglophone cultures. As some languages would disappear, he wonders how
much loss of this kind is permissible from the point of view of justice. Moreover, the
possibility of an Anglophone cultural hegemony accompanying the universalization
of English also raises issues of justice. To sum up, a fair linguistic justice should not
promote such universalization of English.
In another work (Lacey 2014), he argues that a perceived problem for the
democratic legitimacy of the EU is that linguistic diversity across Europe makes
it difficult for there to be a viable European democratic community. In this sense,
he proposed to follow the Swiss model to implement a more radical form of
democracy and better accommodate the diversity. His proposals include the capacity
to hold EU-wide referendums, as well as making the European Commission
open to electoral competition via the European Parliament. According to him,
such measures would address Europe’s legitimacy gap by setting in motion a
process of discursive integration which would allow the synchronization of public
spheres so that a shared system of meaning may lead to a transnational democratic
community.29
2.5 The Principle of Territoriality and the Principle

of Personality
Following the main theories of political philosophy, there are two basic principles
that can guide a fair language policy: territoriality and personality.
Principle of Territoriality The linguistic regulation is established according to the
territory, so that every inhabitant will receive the same treatment. The division of
the territory in linguistic areas and the establishment of borders limit the linguistic
freedom of the citizen, who will have to use the language of the territory where
he is/lives in order to make valid and efficient acts in the public sphere. A linguistic
policy following this principle would mean the imposition of the weaker language as
the official language in a concrete territory, i.e., the language of the administration,
politics, judicial processes, public education, etc. The citizen here does not choose
29 See also Lacey (2017).

102 J. Alcalde
which language to use, but this decision is taken by the language planning of the
state.
This principle can work reasonably well in a homogeneous community com-
posed by monolingual individuals, where the language will be fully recognized.
In a heterogeneous community (and in homogeneous communities composed by
multilingual individuals), only one language is protected, and therefore existing
language diversity would probably need a different language policy to be managed
more fairly.
Principle of Personality The linguistic regulation is established to guarantee that
each citizen will receive services in his/her mother tongue, independently from
the territory where he/she lives. In a linguistic policy based on the principle of
personality (normally following a multicultural theory), the state has to respect the
personal right of each citizen to use the official language chosen by the citizen. Here
it is the citizen who chooses which language to use.
Other authors think that following the principle of personality, it is not clear
that the individual will always choose his/her mother tongue. He could also decide
to choose the majoritarian language in order to maximize his utility (e.g., Brian
Barry). From this perspective, a future linguistic homogeneity would reduce most
of material inequality.
In general, multilingual language policies based on the principle of personality
will grant equal recognition to the existing linguistic identities of citizens. However,
in complex communities, not all languages can be granted official status (although
minorities should have at least special provisions).
De Schutter, Helder (2011), argues against the linguistic territoriality as defended
by Van Parijs (2011a, b). Both authors draw their proposals from real situations
in their country of origin, Belgium. On the one hand, Van Parijs suggests that
the EU (and the world) should follow the federal language system, based on
linguistic territoriality, in which each territory (Flanders and Wallonia) has one
official language.30 As De Schutter mentions, nothing prevents people from being
multilingual, but the territory only grants official status to one language. From a
linguistic justice perspective, Van Parijs’ approach means that each language group
should have a territory in which their language would be the only official language.
Based on Laponce (2001), he argues that this way languages would be protected
from language contact and language shift, which are produced in cases of peaceful
contact between languages, where the more powerful language tends to dominate
and assimilate the other(s).
On the other hand, De Schutter defends the case of Brussels as the model for
the world. In Brussels, both (French-speaking and Dutch-speaking) groups get full
30 However, there are some exceptions. One of them is Brussels, which is part of Flanders. Another
one is the 70,000 German speakers living in Wallonia, who are sometimes called the best protected
language minority in the world (De Schutter 2011: 199 fn. 1). At least, until a future independence
of Catalonia, this could officially recognize the 10,000 Occitan speakers in the Catalan region of
Val d’Aran.
linguistic recognition: Brussels has an officially bilingual status. From a linguistic

justice perspective, De Schutter’s proposal entails equal recognition: “Within certain
practical limits, all native language groups within a region should receive equal
status, so that individuals with the respective identities get language recognition”
(De Schutter 2011: 200).
The main criticism to Van Parijs’ proposal comes from a sociolinguistic fact:
the world is not characterized by linguistically unified territories. Often there is no
congruence between language and territory. In cases where two or more language
groups live intermingled, Van Parijs’ proposal faces important challenges, as only
one of the languages should be given the official recognition: minorities would
be then assimilated or they would move to another place, bilingual people would
not have recognized their mixed identity structure, and coexistence would be more
difficult in conflict situations where several language groups claim the same land.31
Therefore, De Schutter argues that the Brussels model should be adopted in cases
of linguistic diversity. He also adds that even in the (few) cases where there is no
significant diversity, no injustice would be committed by implementing his proposal.
In concrete terms, his proposal includes multilingual language policy granting
equal recognition to the existing linguistic identities of citizens: “Each of the native
language groups should enjoy equal language rights, and the territory’s institutions
become effectively bilingual” (p. 203). It is worth to mention that De Schutter is
talking specifically about native language groups. This way he seems to be drawing
a line between native groups and immigrant groups. About this second category of
language community, he does not mention any particular right.
De Schutter is aware that a full implementation of his model would not be
feasible in some cases. However, he argues that the ideas which lie behind it are
still useful. Therefore, if in a multilingual territory not all languages can be granted
official status, minorities should have at least special provisions.
A controversial aspect of this proposal is the fact that it does not include the
protection of weaker languages from gradually (naturally) eroding, except when
there is a threat to their existence. In that case, the interests of the remaining speakers
of the language (not those who left already or the interests of the language itself)
should be taken into consideration, and, accordingly, some priority in funding or
recognition should be established. In the end, both Van Parijs and De Schutter agree
that linguistic justice should not aim at preventing all language deaths. In other
words, language disappearance is always a loss, but it is not always unjust.
In another work (De Schutter 2007), he presents a review of the literature,
probably the most advanced and comprehensive so far. He constructs a typology
through two dimensions: (a) instrumental vs. constitutive (understanding of the
nature of membership in a linguistic community) and (b) transparent vs. hybrid
(concept of language).
According to him, a way to bridging the constitutive and the intrinsic perspectives
is by saying that individuals have intrinsic interests in their languages.
31 A similar criticism can be found in Robichaud (2011).

104 J. Alcalde
In order to improve the existing theories of justice, he (and similarly Yael

Peled) suggests that they should start from a situation of linguistic hybridity.
Together with Edwards (2003) and Grin (1994, 2003b), he calls for interdisciplinary
proposals.32 Interdisciplinary language policies will be useful, at least for the
following reasons:
1. Theories based on assumptions of monolingual regions and monolingual individ-
uals will be ill-founded.
2. The standard liberal reaction to issues of diversity (neutralism) is unworkable
with regard to linguistic diversity. The continuum freedom/regulation should be
replaced by the instrumental/constitutive one.
3. If language planners who apply survival policies take also into consideration
some instrumentalist views, they will make sure that a community is not
being locked up in an equality-reducing linguistic context. In order to do so,
underlying normative principles of each policy will need to be always visible
and transparent.
4. If language planners understand that linguistic minority rights are also derivative
individual rights, they will be able to avoid instances where the practice of
minority rights clashes with individual interests, recognizing that individual
interests should then be prioritized. At the same time, this insight may help
strengthen the argument for unequal differential treatment, granting therefore
more than an equal share of available resources to compensate for the unchosen
linguistic disadvantage they face.
Grin, François, has developed most of his work on the economics subfield of
linguistic justice. However, some of his works also tackle political theory aspects.
In Grin (2003b) he examines the logic and consequences of the support for social
diversity. He finds a paradox when it comes to the distinction between “indigenous”
and “immigrant” minorities. For example, in the United Kingdom, there are more
Gujarati speakers than Scots Gaelic speakers, but the second enjoys some legal
status, whereas Gujarati has none.
According to Grin, our natural sense of justice leads us to grant more support to
those (old) communities that have been in our country for a long time, as compared
to those (new) ones that just arrived. However, this distinction between oldcomers
and newcomers is problematic. For example, languages such as Spanish, French, or
German have been spoken in the United States for as long as (or even longer than)
English.
Also, the ethnic distribution in Europe is the product of millennia of processes of
migration and assimilation, where no particular dates can be used to identify the fair
distribution, as opposed to the present situation. Without concluding with specific
32 About the need of an interdisciplinary approach to linguistic justice analyses, see also Peled
et al. (2014). Similar perspectives can be found in Tonkin (2015b) concerning the relationship
between language and equality and in Agresti (2016) with regard to linguistic rights. For a practical
application of political science methods into the study of language policy, see Cardinal and Sonntag
(2015).
language policy recommendations, this work is nevertheless useful to remind us the

uncertainties we will always find in the real world.
In more recent works, such as Grin (2011), this author defends the territoriality
principle. Nevertheless, different from Van Parijs, he does with the aim of supporting
linguistic diversity.
Peled, Yael (2010), bases her proposal on the concept of “linguistic human
nature”: the linguistic component of human nature. Humans are, fundamentally, lin-
guistic beings. And our true linguistic human nature is connected to the possession
of several languages much more than to monolingualism. With a deep knowledge
of the sociolinguistic field, she makes such a claim based on the statistical fact that
polyglots surpass the monoglots. In other words, individual linguistic plurality is the
norm rather than the exception.
Without being specific enough to suggest a concrete path or language policy,
she argues that once individual linguistic plurality is perceived as a natural trait
of the human condition, such trait will be supported and nurtured by the political
community. From this, it follows that political communities should design language
policies to promote such a linguistic plurality within the individuals.
According to her, the monolingual political community in the state of society and
the monolingual human being are a prescriptive aspiration rather than a descriptive
observation. In fact, sociolinguistics proves exactly the opposite. Linguistic plurality
is a normal rather than an abnormal trait not just of humanity as a species but
also of the individual humans. The literature, however, has presented this fact in a
different way. The materializing process of this aspiration transformed it something
resembling a law of nature (Burke 2004), which was also a preferential position in
ethical terms (Van Parijs 2011a).
Interesting is also her critique of Pinker’s language instinct, because he never
quite discusses any language other than English. Pinker’s sociobiology says that a
richer conception of human nature can provide insight into language. Peled says
that a richer conception of language can provide us with an important insight into
linguistic human nature. And she concludes by recommending an integrated inter-
disciplinary approach, including sociobiology, the history of ideas and linguistic
ideologies, sociolinguistics, political theory, and philosophy of language. And we
could also add others, such as ecolinguistics, interlinguistics and several subdomains
of law and economics.
When it comes to her own contributions, her two main arguments are:
(a) A plurilingual community is more efficient than its monolingual counterpart in
terms of distribution of wealth and dignity.
(b) When it comes to redistribution, a plurilingual conception of democracy implies
a higher ability to acknowledge and process the complex relations between
language and the essentially nonlinguistic world, an increased sensitivity to the
contextual nature of one’s political community and its practical vocabulary, and
a preferable position for developing stronger skills for reflecting critically on
both.
106 J. Alcalde
From them and after a detailed historical reconstruction (and a solid critique of
Van Parijs’ proposals), she offers a set of tentative principles to build a plurilingual
theory of democracy, which are the following:
1. A shift from society to the individual linguistic plurality. The individual should
be the locus of linguistic plurality and not the state nor the community.
2. Cultural plurality and ethnic diversity are impossible to accommodate in full in
a world of finite resources. In other words, we should think in terms of feasible
proposals for a real world with limited resources.
3. Linguistic prioritization is still important. While reasons of justice compel the
state to acknowledge the existence of linguistic plurality in the civic sphere,
linguistic prioritization should still take place at the societal level in order to
promote linguistic egalitarianism.
4. Individual linguistic plurality does not contradict national identity; there is
commensurability. Human beings, however, often belong to more than one social
sphere. The concept of individual linguistic plurality responds to this challenge
by adopting a more flexible contextual approach to the question of linguistic
justice, which reasserts the preferential status of the national language without
imposing unjustified requirements on linguistic minorities.
5. Language rights do exist, but also language duties and they are applicable to
everybody. So, a new framework based on linguistic rights and duties should be
introduced and extended to all members of the political community, including a
mechanism to impose linguistic duties on the linguistic majority, as an offset of
their exercised right for instating their language as the national variant.
To sum up, language policies should be designed to promote linguistic plurality
within the individuals because a plurilingual community is more efficient than its
monolingual counterpart in terms of distribution of wealth and dignity.
This perspective broadens a debate dominated by the precise principles of
distribution underlying linguistic justice or the particular subset of historical
requirements which may legitimately grant a particular linguistic community its
claim for minority language rights. It also aims at developing sensitivity toward the
complicity between language and ideology through language ethics, ecolinguistics,
and the emergent field of ecolinguistic ethics in terms of resource management and
the long-term implications of language policies for questions of sustainability and
human development.
In my opinion, the biggest contribution of this work is a solid critique of the
monist approach, which has been dominant in history, but also in the contemporary
world, represented by authors such as Van Parijs. In Peled’s words, “the extension
of a monist approach to the realm of human language is increasingly found to be
insufficient at best and harmful at worst”:
(a) Normatively, its promise to ensure greater equality in the distribution of wealth
and dignity is fulfilled only to a very partial extent, which often results in the
justification of existing socioeconomic inequalities rather than in the attempt to
contest it.
(b) Epistemically, it produces a more limited perception of the world, reduced in

its capacities for creativity, empathy, and critical reflection over the complex
and subtle interrelations between language and the world. It does not reduce the
complexity of the world, but our ability to recognize such complexity.
In another work, Peled (2014) advocates for exploring interdisciplinary work
between sociolinguistics, political science, and philosophy beyond the subject
matters themselves, such as “politics” or “language.” This way, she suggests
different ways to combine the linguistic thinking with the political one in the domain
of normative language policy. Similarly, in a recent contribution (Peled 2015), she
sophisticates the analysis by proposing the notion of complex equality to capture
the existent “plurality of goods, spheres and principles that are involved in the
processes of (re)distribution” (p. 288). Similarly, she shows how in the debate of
linguistic justice different authors use different understandings of “language”: (a)
as an ideal, separated from any particular social or political circumstance (e.g., in
the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights); (b) as a standard language, which
frequently implies that standard languages are superior to nonstandards varieties; (c)
as a form of human communication system, which includes geography or ethnicity-
based varieties, pidgins and creoles, sign languages, etc.; and (d) as a linguistic
repertoire, which emphasizes the fact that individuals often speak a number of
languages.
After having refined the conceptual framework of the field, she advocates for
the combination of particular understandings of equality and language, showing a
multiplicity of possible permutations. For example, she shows the potential of her
notion of complex equality combined with the perspective of linguistic repertoires
to link particular spheres with particular linguistic variants. If we think in terms
of geographic spheres, this idea would not be far from those advocating for the
principle of territoriality.33 But Peled goes beyond that to include other contexts,
such as the workplace, the family, or religious life, providing this way a justification
for a much more powerful multilingualism. However, she does not specify which
principles should allow us to choose which language in which sphere.34
In order to achieve a wider and richer ethical discussion, the same author in
another work (Peled 2017) defends a more comprehensive core vocabulary of
language ethics, which goes beyond the (liberal) notion of linguistic justice and
which could include competing political traditions, as well as other significant
notions such as “legitimacy,” “obligation,” “friendship,” “care,” “empathy,” and
“hope.” Additionally, she explores an alternative approach based on the concept
of the dialogical self.
Riera, Elvira (2016), is a recent example of the potential for interdisciplinarity
in this field. Mainly framed within normative political philosophy, her research
33 In fact, Peled mentions as an example Van Parijs’ division between English in the global sphere
and other languages which are “queen of their domain.”

34 In the fourth section of this chapter, we will present several principles by Bastardas (2002), which
are worth exploring in this regard, and particularly his notion of subsidiarity.
108 J. Alcalde
includes sociolinguistic insights and a non-frequent empirical part on political

practices. Thus, she provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of existing
language regulations in current western democracies, comparing the language acts
adopted in terms of their objectives and the restrictions they establish to protect the
use of certain languages vis à vis perceived internal or external threats. Additionally,
she explores in depth the Catalan case. Her extensive knowledge in this sense is
partly due to her professional career as language planner and policymaker at the
Catalan Government.
The author focuses her research on mixed societies, phenomena that challenge
traditional linguistic justice theories because language groups cannot be easily
delimited. She asserts that in these cases, language policies require pluralist
approaches based on the principle of personality. In her view, mixed demoi may
possess two or three common languages, which are both effective vehicles for the
exercise of citizenship and also part of the individuals’ collective identity. She
argues that in mixed societies, first languages spoken are the best variable for
identifying language groups, provided that this variable is open to include several
languages. As such language groups are porous and not monolithic in terms of
individual interests, their members are adaptable in terms of linguistic skills and
identifications. Therefore, their preferences and the choices they may make are
less predictable and particularly dependent on public policies to the extent that the
distinction between majorities and minorities may be blurred.
Over 96 cases analyzed, Riera identifies 16 mixed societies, where significant
numbers of the long-settled population belong to different language groups and live
intermingled. Eight of them are hybrid societies, where bilinguals belong to several
language groups. In most of them, there is a monolingual project of majority nation-
building in the center and plurilingual (competing nation-building) regimes in some
subunits, whose populations tend to be bilingual.
The author builds a comprehensive typology of valued ends for language policies,
which will be used in her empirical comparative analysis of the uses of such values
in the rationales of language acts adopted in western democracies. In order to
do so, she takes into account communicative values, identity-related values, and
other values which are both communicative and identity-related. In some cases, the
adscription to a concrete category is not consensual in the literature. For example,
despite acknowledging an implicit element of collective identity, she decides to
consider values such as social cohesion, coexistence and mutual understanding,
solidarity, and trust within the communicative function of language.
While Riera’s proposal is close to the pluralist approach that opposes the
principle of territoriality defending the equal recognition of all significant long-
settled language groups in a same territory, she uses different arguments. As we have
seen, authors such as De Schutter argue their defense of equal treatment of language
groups as equal recognition, that is, on the grounds of identity interests. By doing so,
they implicitly maintain the association between majority languages, communica-
tion, and social justice, on the one hand, and between minority languages, identity,
and ethno-cultural justice, on the other. On the contrary, Riera contends that all
individuals derive interest from languages both from communication and identity.
In her view, communicative interests rely on people’ linguistic abilities (most

times better in their first languages than in languages learnt after their childhood,
regardless of their condition of majority or minority languages) but also on people’s
linguistic choices in terms of communicative effectiveness, so that in local contexts
where authenticity works as a legitimating linguistic ideology, local languages may
be the best instrumental tools.
In the acts analyzed, both the promotion of majority and minority languages
tend to be sustained by identity-related arguments, which in practice legitimize
the promotion of these languages as effective tools of communication, in an
interdependency of communication and identity. That is, both are instrumental for
each other. According to the author, individual (and collective) identity interests are
better fulfilled when languages possess a certain degree of instrumental usefulness,
whereas communicative interests in a diverse society are better fulfilled if identity
is taken into account, although sometimes this is rather symbolic. Therefore, even
if individuals are perfectly bilingual, their linguistic preferences do matter; and
even when second languages learnt are local languages, individual bilingualism is a
relevant asset for equality of opportunity and social promotion.
In order to implement linguistic justice in mixed societies, Riera suggests
language policies intended to foster and maintain a stable reciprocal bilingualism.
Since this is linked both to individuals’ linguistic skills and to the provision of
fair background conditions for their linguistic choices, it can be seen as a by-
product of the equal treatment of their interests. From this perspective, linguistic
plurality is rather a means than an end, in the sense that it favors the existence
of fair conditions of language choice. The language policy that follows has three
main elements: (a) the public (or official) use of the long-settled population’s first
languages (societal languages), (b) the universal teaching of such societal languages
in public educational systems, and (c) the provision of nonlinguistically segregated
public services, especially relevant in the case of education.
As a critical remark, the selection of cases is questionable. The author labels
them as western democracies, with a peculiar understanding of “western” and
“democracy.” Thus, they include different regions, both geographically and politi-
cally: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russian Federation, Canada, and the United
States. Despite all of them are formally democratic regimes, according to several
indexes, their degree of substantive democracy varies greatly. Riera is aware of this,
but she decided not to use the degree of democracy as a variable because she did not
find significant correlations with linguistic regulations. Finally, she does not include
migrants in her analysis, leaving it to further research.
All things considered, this is a solid and original work, which makes several
contributions to the theoretical literature and which shows promising ways of
translating it into the empirical realm.
110 J. Alcalde
3 Economics
3.1 Introduction
François Grin has defined the economics of language as the field of research that
“refers to the paradigm of mainstream theoretical economics and uses the concepts
and tools of economics in the study of relationships featuring linguistic variables;
it focuses principally, but not exclusively, on those relationships in which economic
variables also play a part” (Grin 1996: 6; also 2003a). As Pool argued at the
beginning of the 1990s, the application of policy analysis tools to language policy
is more recent than in other fields, such as the environment. Grin and Gazzola
(2013) are among the ones who have taken these analyses to a more concrete
level by introducing more sophisticated indicators and measures of both fairness
and efficiency. In fact, this is likely the subfield of research where the greatest
innovation has been produced in recent years. Some of these authors have developed
mainly static analyses (as presented in different works by authors such as François
Grin, Michele Gazzola, Victor Ginsburgh, or Jonathan Pool), whereas others have
dealt with dynamic ones (including several works by authors such as Jonathan Pool,
Reinhard Selten, or Bengt-Arne Wickström).
In a recent survey of the field, Zhang and Grenier (2013, p. 204) explain that so
far it has not “genuinely integrated into the family of economic thought.” They
divide the field into three main schools.35 Whereas in all of them we can find
elements related to the linguistic justice debate, the third one would be the one closer
to our topic of interest. After briefly presenting these three schools, I will turn to the
static and dynamic analysis already mentioned, and I will review several examples
of such promising lines of research. As it will be shown, the strongest point of this
literature is that it has produced innovative, data-based, rigorous, and systematic
tools to describe and measure the present but also to have some insights about the
future. Also, their policy-oriented results are useful to realize the relevance of the
different policy choices. However, such results will always depend on the political
philosophy principles behind each model.
3.2 Language and Status
From the earliest studies, it is understood that language has economic characteris-
tics, such as value, utility, costs, and benefits. When countries had to make choices
about the official languages that they wanted to promote, this allowed the emergence
of a literature on language policy and the relationship between language and income
35 Anotherrelevant review of the literature on language economics is Gazzola et al. (2015). See
also Gazzola and Wickström (2016).
first in Canada and then in other (mainly multilingual and multinational) countries,
such as Spain, Belgium, or Switzerland (as shown in different works by Albert
Breton (1978, 2000), Chiswick and Miller (2007), Grenier and Vaillancourt (1983),
or Grenier and Nadeau (2011)). The objective was to explain the economic status of
different language groups.
Further development of the discipline included insights from human capital
theory by seeing language skills as a source of economic advantage (including
several works by François Grin and François Vaillancourt). Other things being
equal, the more fluent an employee, the higher the wage he can earn. In addition,
specific language skills have positive effects on income. Therefore, language
learning can take place under pure economic incentives to the extent that language
skills have an impact on the creation of value in the economy as a whole (Grin et al.
2011). Research has also shown that the relationship between language and earnings
is related to ethnicity. This also has to do with issues of discrimination of members
of minority language groups and, therefore, to injustice situations.
3.3 Language Convergence and the Survival of Minority

Languages
A second category of economic studies has studied the dynamic development of

languages: language convergence and the survival of minority languages. These
are two sides of the same coin, because minority languages are usually the ones
that are threatened by the lingua franca. As a tool for communication, a common
language reduces transaction costs so that an initial diversity of languages may
develop naturally toward a lingua franca. In this field, it is worth mentioning
the communication potential of languages measured through the Q-value theory
developed by De Swaan (2001). It is here where Zhang and Grenier (2013) include
the debates on linguistic justice we mentioned in the previous section, such as Van
Parijs (2011a).
This kind of economic analysis helps to explain the factors that affect people’s
choices of language. A popular model was developed by Grin (1992), who defined
thresholds for minority language survival as a function of different variables,
including (but not only) the proportion of the population speaking the minority
languages and others, such as language attitudes. In the era of globalization,
this literature shows that the future for minority and indigenous languages is not
particularly bright.
However, some researches challenge this pessimistic view. By studying the
Catalan case, Caminal and Di Paolo (2015 and their chapter in this book) show
that new language skills that appear redundant from a communicative viewpoint
can reduce social segmentation. In particular, the education reform of the 1980s,
by improving the Catalan oral skills among Spanish native speakers, raised the
frequency of mixed couples and the use of Catalan (i.e., the weak language in the
112 J. Alcalde
community) within the couple, despite universal knowledge of Spanish (i.e., the
strong language) already guaranteed communication.
Similarly, Di Paolo and Cappellari (2015) consider the wage impacts of intro-
ducing bilingualism in a bilingual labor market of a developed economy. By
focusing on the Catalan case, they find that returns to bilingual schooling are
positive, decreasing with years of exposure, and stemming mainly from exposure
at compulsory education. In fact, increased bilingual skills would be the main
mechanism through which compulsory reform’s exposure affects labor market
outcomes, especially among Spanish speakers.
3.4 Language Policy and Language Planning
Despite Zhang and Grenier located Van Parijs’ last book within the studies of
the dynamic development of languages (i.e., Section 3.2 of this chapter), from a
language justice perspective, it can also be in a different category, which is the
economic analysis of language policy and language planning (LPLP). Traditionally
left to sociolinguists, economists have introduced new tools and methods to answer
practical questions in the selection and design of LPLP, such as cost-benefit and
rational choice analysis, in other words, by providing criteria to determine how to
allocate resources and language rights.
About allocating resources, several examples include Grin and Vaillancourt
(1999), who suggested understanding language policies as public policies—
therefore, government spending on language policies should be funded from
taxation and be redistributed, as public health or public education are—and Pool
(1991a), who proposed that language planners should select the language that has
the minimum total cost, even if costs should be allocated proportionally to the
different language groups.
As far as language rights in multilingual societies are concerned, Grin (1996)
has proposed the geographical multilingual model and Wickström (2013, 2016b)
the welfare-maximizing model, and Ginsburgh and Weber (2005) have examined
language disenfranchisement (i.e., the failure of a language to be recognized
officially). Moreover, methodologically Zhang and Grenier (2013) mention the
benefits of applying game-theoretical analysis to this field, such as Selten and Pool
(1991), who examined the decision to study a foreign language, as well as the
equilibrium in an economy where several second languages are learned.
For example, Selten (1998) presents a theoretical model based on game theory,
in which people learn languages only for economic reasons. From this perspective,
two outcomes are possible. On the one hand, the national language of a wealthy
language community could potentially stabilize as a widely used second language.
In our current world, that would mean the domination of English, at least until the
growth of Asian economic powers. On the other hand, the second option is related to
the propaedeutic value of Esperanto. Therefore, given that Esperanto facilitates the
learning of other languages (including English), people could learn it extensively
to the point that it becomes a de facto internationally widespread language, making

this way learning English unnecessary.
Jonathan Pool (1987) proposed a model in which each individual has one native
language and tries to maximize his linguistic welfare, i.e., the number of native
speakers of his native language. From this perspective, it is advantageous to speak a
widely spoken language. Each country exhibits a distribution of linguistic welfares,
and the more similar in size a country’s speech communities, the more equal its
distribution of linguistic welfares. The author uses individuals and languages as
alternative units of analysis, based on the scale of language rights elaborated by
Heinz Kloss, whose work we already encountered in the context of political philos-
ophy and Alan Patten. This scale rates the language policies of the countries on the
dimension of supportiveness to linguistic minorities. He first divides pro-minority
language policies into those that confer “tolerance-oriented” and those that confer
“promotion-oriented” rights on linguistic minorities. Whereas tolerance-oriented
rights permit linguistic minorities to cultivate their own languages, promotion-
oriented rights obligate “public institutions” to use and cultivate minority languages.
This dichotomy is interpreted by Kloss into a seven-value scale of language rights,
being (1) the least pro-minority policy and (7) the most pro-minority policy.
1. Allowing linguistic minorities fundamental political rights
2. Allowing the use of minority languages
3. Allowing minorities to organize institutions in which they use their language
4. Allowing minorities to organize private schools in which they cultivate their
language
5. Allowing foreign states to intervene to help minorities carry out activities (3) and
(4)
6. Allowing state institutions to use minority languages when communicating with
minorities
7. Either (a) allowing minorities to organize public institutions of self-government
in which they use their language or (b) using minority languages in all state
communications
It is worth to mention that Pool also considers the possibility of extending the
scale downward to include more extreme anti-minority policies, such as denial of
political rights to linguistic minorities and even genocide, and upward to include
more extreme pro-minority policies, such as the exclusive state use of minority
languages.
Having reached this point, Pool turns to philosophical reflections. In his view,
even if the scale is useful from a measurement point of view, it is not enough
to illuminate on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate linguistic
inequality, rights and privileges, etc. For this reason, he suggests a typology of five
kinds of language-associated inequality, which has been quite influential.36
36 These are: Unequal attributes of different languages, unequal privileges granted to the users of
different languages, unequal linguistic skills of different persons, unequal statuses conferred on
114 J. Alcalde
In a more recent work, Pool (2010) considers that massive linguistic extinction
may not be a necessary consequence of globalization, because several strategies are
available for making panlingual rather than unilingual globalization a reality. He
presents four of them, offering Panlex as an example of the fourth one.
According to Pool, globalization can promote, but also diminish, linguistic
diversity. However, most of the evidence available shows an inverse relationship.
One the one hand, linguistic diversity, maintenance, and revitalization are not
generally popular ideals. On the other hand, there is a collective action problem,
because benefits conferred by linguistic diversity tend to be dispersed, whereas its
costs are imposed on those who maintain low-density languages. When choosing
whether to learn and use low-density languages and assuming that individuals act
egoistically, they would choose defection and then the language would probably
atrophy and die. However, such massive linguistic extinction can be avoided by
several action strategies (Fettes 2003; Tonkin 2003).
The first one would be sociocultural: marketing multilingualism. Some authors,
such as Nettle and Romaine (2000), Crystal (2000), Abley (2003), and Harrison
(2007), argue that the existence of thousands of languages is positive for humanity.
For example, the loss of a language means the loss of irreplaceable knowledge of
medicine and nature, encoded in languages’ lexicons, as well as evidence for the
scientific understanding of language and the human mind, the diverse ideas arising
from languages’ differing systems of knowledge representation, but also the respect,
tolerance, and enjoyment built from people learning to live in a multilingual world.
Moreover, they say cultural and biological diversity depends on linguistic diversity.
For all these reasons, this has to be preserved, although it has also been argued
that efforts to preserve low-density languages could inadvertently devalue medium-
density ones (see, e.g., De Swaan 2004).
The second one comes from economics: ecolinguistic compensation. Authors
such as Van Parijs have analyzed compensation mechanisms as a means of making
dominant languages more equitable for those who do not speak them natively and
of making official language policies fair and efficient (Pool 1991a; Ammon 2006:
333–336). Inspired by already-existing ecological compensation mechanisms, these
authors design mechanisms to give financial support to those who keep their native
languages alive and vibrant, by treating them as service providers. This could be
complemented by analysis, documentation, and instruction of the languages, whose
costs would not be paid by them. The challenge would be to know who is eligible
for the payments and how much to pay each of them.
The political strategy is linguistic subsidiarity and, in my view, this is the more
utopian one. It is based on the reorganization of the world into linguistic communi-
ties which govern themselves and are socioeconomically autonomous. Nation-states
different persons by linguistic rules and customs, and inequalities co-varying with language but
not caused by language. I present them with some detail in the section on esperantology, taking
advantage of an article by Mark Fettes, who analyzes each of them from the point of view of the
Esperanto community.
would be replaced by internally cohesive low-density language communities who

would make their language official and treat it as the main medium of education, etc.
This would make jurisdictional and transactional boundaries more coincident with
language boundaries and would also transfer authority from world bodies to single-
language local units of government as much as is practical, i.e., the subsidiarity
principle proposed by Bastardas (2002).
The fourth one is technological: panlingual transparency. It focuses on mul-
tilingual automatic translation, so that anybody who knows any language could
understand thoughts and emotions expressed in any other language. As Pool argues,
in this situation, the incentives for assimilation to high-density languages would
be diminished, with the amount of diminution depending on the quality of the
translation. Probably the main criticism to this idea is the fact that, after half a
century of effort, the still laughable automatic translations between high-density
languages could mean that panlingual translation is simply too difficult.
Another useful distinction between efficiency and fairness is provided by Grin
(2008a). He compares seven models of language regimes (the six already introduced
by Pool 1991a and a seventh proposed by Gazzola 2006), comparing advantages
and disadvantages with the aim of finding the best way to ensure communication at
reasonable cost in the EU:
1. Monarchic: English.
2. Synarchic: Esperanto.
3. Oligarchic: English, German, and French.
4. Panarchic: All EU official languages (now 24).
5. Hegemonic: All EU official languages (now 24) and English the bridge language
in translation and interpretation.
6. Technocratic: All EU official languages (now 24) and Esperanto the bridge
language in translation and interpretation.
7. Triple symmetrical relay: All EU official languages (now 24) and three languages
are used as a bridge language in translation and interpretation.
The results show a sort of trade-off between translation and language learning.
The less translation a proposal needs, the more language learning it will need. The
comparative discussion between these different regimes does not go into much
detail, but the relevant point is that depending on the relative importance given
to different criteria such as communicative speed, organizational simplicity, or
inclusiveness, any of these models can be considered the best. This is not an intuitive
conclusion and suggests that perfect or obvious solutions do not exist and that we
must clarify policy goals in order to adequately design fair language policies.
One of the most relevant pieces from this perspective is Wickström (2010), which
applies several economic theories of justice to linguistic rights, defined in terms of
status planning in specific domains. In this piece, the author extends cost-benefit
analysis to include distributional issues. In a previous work (Wickström 2008), he
presents a sort of state of the art of the discipline. Like many current sociolinguists
and political philosophers, he begins by acknowledging that the most important
functions that language serves are as a means of communication and as a carrier
116 J. Alcalde
of cultural identity. From this perspective, he proposes both a descriptive and a

normative analysis of different aspects of language use.
The cost-benefit analysis is part of the descriptive analysis of the communicative
value of language use. Following pioneering works by Selten and Pool, the idea is
that the benefits of a language will grow as long as it grows the number of speakers
of that language, whereas the costs will grow if the speakers are difficult to reach.
Maybe the most innovative part of Wickström’s approach is a third relationship
which happens between the number of individuals within reach of any speaker
and the social structure. The results of applying such a model seem conclusive:
In general, it pays for an individual to learn the biggest language used in his or
her surroundings, and, as a consequence, the model predicts a reduction of the use
of smaller languages in the community. From this perspective, globalization will
lead to a strengthening of a few strong languages and the disappearance of other,
weaker, languages. However, the reduction of communication costs through new
technologies could strengthen smaller languages. If this is so for a communicative
understanding of language, the author shows how the introduction of the cultural
identity role of language changes the model, and given that individuals learn
languages also for identity reasons, multilingualism can permanently survive. As a
consequence, several injustices of language policies are identified, and proposals to
ensure the language rights of national minorities are presented as well as normative
suggestions to improve the linguistic justice of the EU.
Another promising (and already fruitful) line of research is developed by Michele
Gazzola (e.g., 2014b, c). This work analyzes the distributive consequences of
language policies by assessing the effects of language policies on the relative
position of citizens and stakeholders in terms of access to communication with
public authorities.37 In my opinion, the main contribution of this line of research
to the literature is that it allows empirical answers (by building indicators) to
different questions, such as what could be the distributive effects on European
citizens of a change of the current language policy of the EU? Which social groups
would be disadvantaged from a drastic reduction in the number of the official
languages of the EU? The results of the author show that a change in the current
language policy of the EU would have significant distributional consequences
among countries but also on social groups in a regressive direction. Therefore,
a drastic reduction in the number of official and working languages of the EU
would be significantly detrimental to EU citizens with a low level of education
and income and to the elderly. From a linguistic justice perspective, institutional
multilingual communication should be maintained because it contributes to social
cohesion in the EU. The alternative proposals, either an English-only language
37 Partially inspired by this approach, Alcalde (2015a) explores the possibility of applying the
notion of linguistic justice from a public policy perspective to historical phenomena, such as the
League of Nations. He also shows that several of the main elements of contemporary debates,
such as the idea of parity of esteem, were already present during the negotiation of the linguistic
regime of the League of Nations, which took place at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Another
historical application of linguistic justice is Sujoldžić (2016). See also Nitobe (1998).
policy or an oligarchic language regime, would create significant inequalities among

EU residents based on their socioeconomic status. In other words, they would be
unfair.
In an original article, Samuel Bowles (2011) does not define linguistic justice, but
he says that there is a relationship between keeping cultural diversity as something
positive and having a basic income grant as social policies that reduce economic
risk. Bowles says that if the basic income grant was big enough, people would not
have an incentive to learn the lingua franca.
This debate was started by Van Parijs when he asked “to what extent ethnic,
linguistic, religious and other differences among citizens might reduce support
for public policies that redistribute income?” (Van Parijs 2003a, b). D’Antoni and
Pagano (2002) answered that cultural diversity within a nation inhibits geographical,
occupational, and other forms of mobility when economic adversity requires a job
change or other relocation, thereby exposing citizens to greater economic risks and
inducing them to demand more adequate levels of economic insurance.
This builds from a previous work (Bowles and Pagano 2006) in which the
authors argued that an unconditional basic income grant would reduce the citizen’s
incentives to learn a lingua franca rather than investing in acquiring more culturally
specific skills. The reason is that learning the lingua franca is costly, but it reduces
the expected cost of losing one’s job. It substitutes a fixed transfer for a variable
flow of income. Because the degree of an individual’s risk aversion varies with the
level of risk exposure, the provision of a basic income grant reduces the citizen’s
risk aversion and hence limits her demand for the implicit insurance provided by a
lingua franca. Also, policies promoting learning the lingua franca will reduce the
demand for social insurance. Interestingly, those who invest in either more universal
skills or skills specific to more than one culture provide important benefits to their
fellow citizens and noncitizens alike.
According to this author, the lingua franca and the basic income grant are
substitutes: they both accomplish risk reduction. One may eliminate the incentive
to learn the lingua franca (if the basic income grant is big enough). A smaller basic
income grant would reduce the optimal acquisition of the lingua franca (compared
to the no-basic income grant situation), but not eliminate it. Therefore, in this model,
cultivating culturally diverse network ties could play a similar role to learning the
lingua franca.
A different perspective is suggested by Kimura (2007). The author establishes
a parallel between languages and money. According to Kimura, both language and
money share some characteristics: both are instruments of interchange and both can
be used as a symbol of identity. According to Kimura, there are different under-
standings of “rationality” and “efficiency.” Traditional scholars tend to consider the
coexistence of many languages is in a single territory as being inefficient. From this
perspective, the movements in support of minority languages have been traditionally
viewed as irrational. Nevertheless, recent research in the economics of language
has shown that different types of economic values are associated with languages
(Grin 2003b; Gazzola 2014a), and therefore a language policy designed to promote
minority languages could be not only fairer but also more efficient.
118 J. Alcalde
4 Sociolinguistics and Ecolinguistics
This is an area of research that resonates with other disciplines, such as applied
linguistics, education science, sociology, and biology. These authors possess a vast
knowledge about the language situation of the word and traditionally have been
working on documenting and describing language inequalities.
They have created relevant concepts, such as linguistic human rights, linguistic
subsidiarity, linguistic genocide, and linguistic imperialism.38 Nevertheless, they
have not provided concrete and feasible proposals to overcome such language
injustices. In general, they argue that linguistic diversity should be preserved and
mother tongue education should be provided for everyone in non-fee state schools.
In my opinion, most of the leading figures in this field have been instrumental in
providing evidence that have inspired other fields for the defense of minority rights,
including economics and policy analysis. However, most of research done in applied
linguistics (and education sciences) has focused on language teaching and language
use in multilingual settings. From this perspective, there is a potential for growth of
the sociolinguistic approach of linguistic justice in the coming years.
One of these leading figures is Robert Phillipson (see, e.g., 1992, 1998, 2003,
2016). According to him, most language policies in application today have little
to do with tolerance or equality of languages, including the unequal allocation of
funds to the different languages within a policy. He also criticizes the fact that
standard setting in the human rights field has been hypocritical (i.e., a contrast
between declarations and practice) while affirming that declarations still have a
value. However, language policies are often so vague and abstract that they cannot
be applied to ensure linguistic justice.
When talking about the consequences of such languages policies, he emphasizes
the formation of elites and the hierarchization of languages at different levels
(national but also international). For example, in postcolonial settings, there has
been a false imitation of western education and, therefore, a focus on European
languages. He maintains that, broadly speaking, there is a choice in language
ecology between allowing market forces a free run and attempting to manage
our linguistic resources along agreed and more democratic lines. Obviously, he
recommends the second way, even if in some countries, such as France and the
United Kingdom, this is more difficult, because there is the “illusion of monolingual
linguistic self-sufficiency.” In a more recent work, he argues that globalization
appears to be shrinking not only low-density languages but also the use of medium-
density languages in science, diplomacy, business, and other domains (Phillipson
2008).
Another one is Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (see, e.g., 1998), who has edited several
influential works together with Phillipson. She argues that languages are used
38 The notion of linguistic imperialism does not always relate to the English language. See, e.g.,
Moreno Cabrera (2015) for an analysis of the Spanish linguistic imperialism. See also Comellas
(2006). For an empirical application of linguistic imperialism, see Philipson (2016).
as vehicles of control by “colonizing the mind.” This way, those who “own”
the language also shape the content of the hegemonizing message. According to
her, this would explain why everybody worldwide is supposed to want to learn
English. Such a mechanism enables global hegemonic control, homogenization,
and even linguistic and cultural genocide for linguistic minorities and monolingual
reductionism for linguistic majorities. At the same time, there is inefficient foreign-
language teaching. In her view, a common factor in all these processes is the blaming
of the victims for the results. In order to improve the language situation, effective
and rational change strategies should include grassroots organization, analyzing
the messages transmitted through language, ending tolerance for monolingualism,
respecting linguistic and cultural human rights, and developing an ecological
paradigm for language policy.
In another work (2008), she speaks about the violation of the right to education
suffered by indigenous and minority children in most countries. She argues that
most disappearing languages are victims of linguistic genocides. In this sense,
educational systems and mass media are the most important direct agents in
linguistic and cultural genocide. According to her, one reason why linguistic human
rights in education and maintenance of all the world’s languages are necessary,
is to counteract crimes against humanity. By using international legal texts, she
claims that both concepts “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” are the ones
who better apply to the situation she is describing. Therefore, most indigenous and
minority education in the world participates in committing linguistic and cultural
genocide according to the definitions of the UN Convention. From the point of view
of linguistic justice, this probably constitutes the most extreme case of injustice.
She argues that linguistic human rights in education are a necessary but insuffi-
cient prerequisite in the struggle to prevent linguistic genocide and crimes against
humanity. As she has stated in many other publications, the most central linguistic
human right in education is mother tongue education in non-fee state schools. In
general, linguistic human rights consist of some language rights plus human rights.
She also mentions that in many human rights documents, language is one of the
most important human characteristics on the basis of which people are not allowed
to be discriminated against (as well as gender, race, and religion). Still language
often disappears from the educational paragraphs of binding instruments. She points
to the fact that frequently the language used is vague and ambiguous so that states
can interpret the texts as they like.
She also connects sociolinguistics with ecolinguistics when she says that lin-
guistic diversity and biodiversity are strongly interrelated. Thus, knowledge about
maintenance of biodiversity is encoded in small languages. The conclusion is that
variety and resilience are vital to survival and so biocultural diversity is essential for
long-term planetary survival as it enhances creativity, adaptability, and stability.
A critical view of such ecolinguistic perspective can be found in Pupavac
(2012: Chap. 9). According to this author, such proposals tend to romanticize the
hard socioeconomic conditions of families who work on subsistence agriculture.
In a previous chapter, she explains the tensions that exist between sustainable
120 J. Alcalde
development models and human rights strategies, which require state provisions
to protect minority languages (Pupavac 2012: Chap. 7).
Mauro La Torre (1998) focuses on the realm of education. Given that the
knowledge of certain languages breeds familiarity with the cultures associated with
those languages, three possible educational language policies exist: the localist,
the alienist, and the democratic one. Whereas the first emphasizes the compulsory
instruction in the national language (in monocultural societies) and the second
one is based on a selected foreign language (and culture), the author proposes
go beyond both of them, by promoting democratic solutions characterized by the
valorization of mother tongues and ancestral traditions while developing at the same
time effective intercultural means of communication.
Tonkin (e.g., 1998) presents several challenges faced by an ecological approach
to language policy. He begins by a sociolinguistic fact: The European notion which
clearly distinguishes between one language and another is linked to European
definitions of state, law, culture, and national borders. In the rest of the world,
the boundaries among languages only begin to exist when users acknowledge that
they are speaking a different language. In general, therefore, the use of a language
depends on the circumstance. This means that people use the same language
in different ways, normally for mixed reasons (i.e., both instrumental and those
connected to personal identity). As an instrument, then, a language will be used
when it is useful and so, it will not be always learnt to a proficient level; only to the
level it is needed.
A new order based on linguistic equality will need to acknowledge a growing
awareness of language rights on the part of weaker states, societies, and commu-
nities but also a growing awareness of language responsibilities on the part of the
powerful. When thinking about international communication, he considers that the
introduction of Esperanto in the UN should be done in different phases, beginning
with a passive knowledge of the language. According to him, the first to acquire an
active usage of the language should be the staff of the organization.
On another front, Bastardas-Boada (2010)—translating and updating a previous
book in Catalan—presents a current (and future) world in which languages do not
fight for supremacy, because they have found a sort of equilibrium in a duality
between the global and the local. The rise of English means that this is the global
lingua franca, whereas local language communities digitally connected coexist in
harmony. An example of such a change would be the role of today’s francophonie
movement, which seeks “the recognition of language diversity, contrary to the
classically uniformist postulates adopted by France (p. 37).” In part, this is due to the
fact that people attribute a secondary role to languages as identity markers, because
identity is not permanent any more, but something in evolution, continuously
negotiated. In different moments, the author mentions that the predominance of
English may be considered unfair or even imperialistic by some. However, he
maintains that this is a process that cannot be stopped and that it has more
advantages than disadvantages. Moreover, the disadvantages or challenges can be
controlled if every linguistic domain is specified so that it is clear which language
should be used in every case. Similarly, the evolution toward such a dual world
will need a long transition, which makes things easier, by preparing everyone for
the change. In a way, the analysis and the policies that result from these ideas
remind Van Parijs’ proposals, though here the perspective is mainly sociolinguistic
(though some sociologists and international relations authors are also used through
the book).
In the meantime, big languages such as Arabic, Mandarin, or Spanish will grow
to become a sort of regional languages. He speaks about people having multiple
identities and the possibility for the normal citizen of being multilingual. However,
when confronted with a likely situation of needing up to five languages to live in
a community in the age of globalization (e.g., a migrant in a place with a local
language which is different from national and the international, etc.), he fears that
people will have to make decisions about which of them prioritize, which makes the
future of many languages uncertain.
According to this author, the biggest trend in this era is related to migration.
One the one hand, a migrant has both rights and responsibilities. On the other
hand, they are one of the main driving forces toward more multilingualism within
the different countries. And this is so because they will have to learn the new
language(s), but they should also be allowed to keep theirs. In order to differentiate
the rights of regional minorities and those of immigrants, Bastardas mentions Van
Parijs (2004) when he says “locally-existing cultural diversity, usually a result of
immigration, does not deserve the same protection that we should afford to territory-
based diversity; the long standing (and especially linguistic) differences between
regions.”
In order to organize a multilingual world, Bastardas suggests building it from
four principles:
(a) (Official and symbolic) recognition of the different languages in an equalitarian
way.
(b) Communicability, in order to have a language to use across boundaries. A + b
would mean to recognize all languages equally in an official way (both at
the state and at the level of the EU, e.g.) and, at the same time, to ensure
communication by making clear which is the language shared by everybody
in an efficient way so that we keep the advantages of this solution.
(c) Sustainability is what protects us from the dangers of the common language. In
other words, communicability should not go against sustainability. And we will
achieve sustainability from having plural identities and from the subsidiarity
principle.
(d) Subsidiarity, i.e., everything that can be done through the local language should
be done this way and not in another more global one. This means that in some
cases, the governments will act to prevent that the lingua franca overacts in
dimensions where it should not. In fact, the author predicts an increase of such
areas of conflict with the English language. The result is then a more united, but
also more multilingual, world, in which several languages coexist in the same
space but in different levels or dimensions. Finally, the author tries to apply his
122 J. Alcalde
ideas to the case of Catalonia, which presumably is what he has in mind when
proposing his theory.39
Villa (2013) presents the situation of English in the Italian universities. Accord-
ing to her, English-only policies make more difficult to engage locals with science,
and this is a democratic deficit. She uses examples from Scandinavian countries,
such as Sweden, where a kind of diglossic situation (English having higher status
than Swedish) is analyzed as a problematic development. Moreover, due to the
positive trends of emerging countries in terms of job creation, such as Brazil, from
a student’s point of view, it seems irrational to study only English. However, her
main thesis is that English should be one of the languages of science in Italy, the
other being Italian. An interesting aspect of the book is that the author is not a
sociolinguist, but a professor of immunology in the University of Milan, which
indicates that this topic has become of general interest. The main criticism, in my
opinion, is the fact that after criticizing the Scandinavian policies, her proposal is
not that different from their results, with a language for high-level domains (i.e.,
communicating with the world) and the other one for lower-level domains (e.g., as
a mere language of knowledge dissemination to be used with the locals).
Also Rosemary Salomone (2015) discusses the case of Italian and French
universities adapting to the rise of global English. After examining the different
arguments for and against the use of English as the medium of instruction in higher
education, she proposes a balanced language policy that takes into account the need
of English—which should be taught to everyone beyond any discrimination—while
keeping in mind the linguistic rights of national, minority, and immigration language
speakers.
Beyond western realities, it is worth mentioning the study by Suzanne Romaine
(2015), who addresses the role of English in developing countries, showing how
a language policy favoring English at the cost of local languages can worsen the
economic chances of the majority of the population. On another front, Hamid and
Kirkpatrick (2016) are critical of the foreign-language policies in Asia and Australia
because they tend to be approached from an exclusively utilitarian perspective.
As a consequence, the teaching of English in Asian countries does not have a
similar counterpart in the teaching of Asian languages in Australia. This way,
both the humanistic and sociocultural dimensions of language learning are ignored,
but also the less utilitarian languages themselves, creating an unequal (linguistic)
relationship between the communities.40
Boran, Idil (2003). This author uses the existing similarities between language
diversity and biodiversity to advocate for language policies that promote language
diversity. For example, whereas protecting biodiversity usually implies protecting
ecosystems within small territories, from an ecolinguistics perspective, the world’s
39 For an application of this principle together with the principle of personality, see Alcalde
(2016b).
40 However, a recent study has shown that differences between multilingual and lingua franca
language regimes in Southern Asian countries could also depend on state traditions. See Lui (2015).
most common languages are spoken by 90% of the world’s population: whereas
thousands of other languages are only spoken by small communities.
Interestingly, the places with the richest biodiversity tend to be also the ones with
the richest linguistic diversity. Both types of diversity are normally greater in areas
that have not been fully colonized by agricultural civilizations and also in areas
delimited by geographical barriers. Similar mechanisms work in both cases, such as
the new organisms (and languages) that farmers bring with them to the detriment of
the local ones or the limitations of the movement of species (and cultures) posed by
the geographical terrain.
Probably the most relevant contribution of Boran’s piece is the idea that linguistic
diversity, like biodiversity, can be considered a public good. A public good is a good
in which individuals cannot be excluded from use and where use by one individual
does not reduce availability to others (see also the introduction of this book).
In this sense, there are several arguments to consider linguistic diversity as a
public good. The first one reminds the aesthetic value of language, which is not
only an instrument of communication but also a medium for artistic works. From
a linguistic perspective, losing a language means losing all the pieces of art in
that language. However, this is not an undisputed argument, as the recognition
of artistic ventures as public goods and the policy implications this entails is
controversial. Second, arguments related to scientific value. Thus, local cultures
include useful information about the world, often far less self-evident to western
scholars than to them. However, if we accept that the value of this knowledge could
be overestimated, this would also be a weak argument.
Third, she analyzes individual’s freedom of choice as grounds for supporting
language diversity. This line of thinking is also problematic, since language rights
have an essentially collective nature. In other words, different from what happens
in the fields of politics or religion, the individual’s freedom to live in a particular
language is conditioned to the access to a substantial community of speakers. David
Laitin will also make a similar claim.
Instead, she suggests a principle of fairness that resembles the logic of compen-
sation proposed in some of his works by Philippe van Parijs (e.g., Van Parijs 2003a,
b). In sum, if we accept that linguistic diversity is a public good, then the cost of its
maintenance should be shared by linguistic majorities.
In fact, some authors have argued that cultural diversity is also valuable to the
majority (Goodin 2006) and even for humanity (e.g., Crystal 2000). The parallels
between linguistic diversity and biodiversity can be understood along these lines.
Also Dworkin (1993) develops the idea of intrinsic value of preserving cultures.
However, intrinsic value-based arguments for language policy have been widely
criticized (e.g., Weinstock 2003).
Miquel Sigual was a Catalan psycholinguist with interest in political theory. He
did not mention the term “linguistic justice” in his main book (1996), but language
policy, mainly in the European Union. He criticized the current official policy of the
EU. From a democratic perspective, the fact that only national languages are used in
the institutions of the EU is controversial (and also very expensive and complicates
decision-making processes). At the same time, (a simplified) English performs its
124 J. Alcalde
role of lingua franca, which gives advantages to native speakers and puts in danger
the survival of other languages. In the conclusion, he says that the EU language
policy should be oriented to preserve its diversity.
On a side note, he is one of the fathers of the current language policy in Catalonia,
the so-called immersion, by which children at school learn math or history in
Catalan. It seems he brought the system from Quebec. He also defended in public
debate the importance of bilingualism (for Catalans, the need to learn Spanish),
which made him a controversial figure in both sides. He mentions Esperanto as a
good idea, but according to him the fact that after more than 100 years no state or
institution has adopted it as an official or auxiliary language does not allow us to
keep on considering this as a current project.
Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. Without naming it as linguistic justice, Moreno
Cabrera presents an original definition of the concept based on language rights
(2006). He claims that it is easier to obtain a passive competence of a language than
an active one. According to him, every person has the right to express him/herself the
largest number of times in his/her own language(s), which is the one he/she speaks
best and the ones which allows him/her to express himself fully. The solution to
the language problem is then a passive or receptive plurilingualism, named here as
sesquilinguism or semi-bilingualism. This way we achieve both “the idiosyncrasy
of languages + intercomprehension.”
In my opinion, this author is right when he says that it is easier to understand half
a dozen of languages than to speak one of them perfectly. This way, by encouraging
every person to speak in their mother tongue fulfills the mission of ensuring a basic
right, while at the same time, by not requiring speaking to this person in the same
language, it also ensures the same right of his interlocutor. Accordingly, language
policies should promote the passive understanding of a quantity of languages,
possibly the ones the person will need in the future. For example, I would say it
makes more sense to learn to understand the languages which are geographically
(but also linguistically) closer than those more distant ones. Probably this proposal
is more feasible in contexts of languages of the same family (e.g., Slavic languages),
and it would present more problems for intercomprehension in cases of speakers of
languages which are very distant from each other.
From an interdisciplinary perspective (strongly influenced by sociolinguistics), it
is worth listing the recommendations from the concluding session of the first Nitobe
symposium of international organizations (Fettes and Bolduc 1998), as principles to
achieve a just, efficient, and sustainable world language order: (a) the conservation
of linguistic and cultural diversity; (b) the entrenchment of linguistic human
rights, including effective mother tongue and second language education; and
(c) high-quality, reciprocal, widely accessible linguistic communication between
different cultural and linguistic groups. Also from an interdisciplinary perspective,
sociolinguists Iannàcaro and Dell’Acquila (2016) defend that the idea of linguistic
justice developed in political philosophy should be related to their concept of
linguistic ease, by which they consider the freedom of concern of the speaker in
a given social interaction, according to the social norms of use.41
A remarkable recent contribution is Pillar (2016), arguably the first sociolinguis-
tics textbook from an interdisciplinary approach that includes many elements from
political philosophy, which aims at bringing the debates on justice closer to the
students of applied sociolinguistics.
From a critical perspective, Pupavac (2012: Chap. 4) argues that advocacy
over threatened languages is related to models of cultural linguistic conditioning
influenced by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis rather than Chomskian universalism. On
another front, she criticizes linguistic imperialist approaches because they do not
offer a comprehensive picture of contemporary global power relations to the extent
that their strategies may be understood as a form of legal multicultural imperialism,
which in a counterintuitive way ends up legitimizing global governance by western
powers over weaker societies.42
An original perspective in this field is the one by Martinez (2017), who analyzes
cases of linguicism (defined by Skutnabb-Kangas as the domination of one language
at the expense of others) and linguistic violence in a Californian school, particularly
against Black and Latinx youth. He criticizes the fact that they are labelled from
a deficit perspective by the educators as English learners or long-term English
learners, undervaluing this way their linguistic resources and stigmatizing them,
and suggests the creation of a language of solidarity for them that overcomes such
situation.
Finally, the language problem in science and in academia should also be
mentioned in this section. This has been studied by Blanke and Blanke (2015),
Fiedler (2014), Gazzola (2010, 2012), and Wandel (2011), among others, showing
that Anglo-Saxon native speakers enjoy an important privilege when writing
scientific articles participating in academic discussions, etc.43 Moreover, following
sociolinguists such as Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, such privilege might have
broader effects than the usual challenges faced by nonnative speakers when building
their careers, which might include cultural and ideological biases associated with
the different political cultures and ways of understanding the world that brings each
particular language brings with it.
41 For a similar approach, see Gobbo and Alcalde (2016).

42 InPupavac’s view, such governance could change the character of indigenous communities and
indigenous languages. See below Sect. 6.2 on critical legal studies.
43 See also Gordin (2015) for the international role that other languages have played historically in
science, such as Russian or planned languages including Esperanto and Ido.

126 J. Alcalde
5 Interlinguistics and Esperantology
Traditionally, interlinguists were among the first who cared about linguistic jus-
tice and Esperanto speakers have naturally researched and documented linguistic
rights.44 Thus, they have brought to the debate the possibility of using a planned
language in language policies. Although they would need to overcome a coordina-
tion problem (Pool 1991b), potentially such solutions are the ones that combine best
the need for effective communication and the defense of language rights, including
the preservation of minority languages. These authors help to think outside the
box about the future and to consider tools that are frequently missing in analysis
from other disciplines. For example, Esperanto has shown during the last century its
possibilities as a neutral and easy-to-learn tool in all domains needed to become a
useful international auxiliary language.
As it will be shown, there has been an evolution, and current scholars do not
longer believe Esperanto is the solution to all language issues. Therefore, in order to
build fair linguistic regimes, the use of an international auxiliary language could be
a tool in a broader set of language policies, together with others, such as intercom-
prehension in particular cases. According to the Universal Esperanto Association, a
fair global linguistic regime should be based on democratic communication, global
education, effective language learning, multilingualism, language rights, language
diversity, and human emancipation.
As far as their weak points are concerned, most of the ideas have not been
properly tested yet. Additionally, some of the experiments that have been carried
out do not meet all the necessary research standards of quality. Moreover, this
subdiscipline still suffers from prejudices and ignorance from other scholars.
Finally, many authors consider that Esperanto missed its opportunity and that
English is today the global lingua franca.
If linguistic justice interested early advocates of international planned languages
such as Privat or Piron, it does so even more recent figures in this field. In fact, it
is not hazardous that several chapters of the book in homage of Humphrey Tonkin
(Blanke and Lins 2010) speak explicitly about lingva justeco. In fact, despite we
have already talked about Tonkin in the previous section, he is one of the major
figures of interlinguistics (e.g., Tonkin 2006, 2015a). Another one that we have
already encountered, but deserves to be mentioned again here, is Mauro La Torre.
Both Catalan pioneer Delfí Dalmau in his writings from the 1920s (see also
Solé i Camardons 1998) and Umberto Eco in his more recent search to the perfect
language (1993) dedicate good words to the most successful planned language so far
(Esperanto), which, combined with intercomprehension (or in the words of Dalmau,
“passive polyglotism”), could become the most efficient and fair language policy to
be applied in international relations.
44 See Fiedler (2015) for a recent survey of the topic of planned languages in the current specialist
literature.
More recently, also François Grin (2008b) considers this possibility. According
to him, if one promotes multilingualism and encourages mutual understanding, this
leads to a fairer situation and could prepare the way to a development in which
Esperanto can find its place. If we apply intercomprehension to the EU and taking
into account that there are 12 groups of related languages, this would reduce the
directions of translation and interpretation to 253, less than one half of today’s
number. Moreover, the savings could be distributed in a way that the countries which
made the most effort to learn other languages would receive more. Interestingly, he
mentions other similar projects, such as adopting a language in addition to those
needed in the EU, rotating the languages so that each is used in turn and strong
languages do not dominate the weaker ones, and the use of a bridge language
such as Esperanto. To sum up, intercomprehension encourages multilingualism and
promotes fair practices, leading to a new vision of communication in a multilingual
context in which Esperanto also has a role to play.
Similarly, Maat (2016) confronts the imbalances, disadvantages, and various
types of injustices caused by the adoption of a natural language as the lingua franca
of the world with a situation in which everybody keeps their own native tongue
for local use whereas for international communication uses a common (artificial)
language, owned by all mankind in equal measure.45
Other sophisticated analysis has concluded that the optimal language policy
alternative for the EU would be one employing a planned language as lingua franca
(e.g., Montagut 2004; Gobbo 2005). Other authors such as Fettes or Tonkin have
studied how a planned language could help the financial situation of the EU’s
language services (but also the UN language policy), improving at the same time
the quality of translation and interpretation. Also Christiansen (2006) sees the role
of Esperanto as a relay language and as an internal working language for the
EU institutions as the best solution in the long term. Interestingly enough, she
differentiates between the short and the long term, and in fact, her best solution in
the short term is a different one and includes the use of several working languages
(but no use of mother tongue), acknowledging this way that even if we accept
that Esperanto could help to solve the so-called language problem, a transition
period is nevertheless necessary, in which other language policy proposals need
to be considered. This idea also has to do with the fact that any language policy
based on Esperanto will have to face several disadvantages, being one of them the
transformation required by the educational system.
However, the main disadvantage facing this kind of proposals might be prejudice
and ignorance, which are often still deeply rooted in serious scholarship. For
example, Buchmüller-Codoni (2012) analyzes the relationships between language
policy and democracy in the European Union including the possibility of using
Esperanto, which is presented as a language very difficult to learn: “The major
drawback is probably the fact that the learning of Esperanto is very difficult, due
to the lack of books and other instruction material. It is not accessible for everyone
45 See also Gobbo (2016).

128 J. Alcalde
and it is highly questionable why we should learn a language for communication

within the EU that has no meaning at all outside Europe” (Buchmüller-Codoni 2012:
12). Likewise, Van Bendegem (2004) seems to understand that the sole purpose of
a universal common language would be to replace all existing languages, missing
therefore the main points behind the whole discipline of interlinguistics. Similarly,
the objection by Van Parijs to the lack of neutrality of Esperanto is quite surprising
keeping in mind his embracement of English as a global lingua franca. As Grin
(2003b) suggests, such criticisms are as absurd as saying that because democracy is
not a totally equalitarian system, that is a reason to prefer feudalism.
We also find critics of Esperanto in some scholars of the field of ecology of
language. In general, those who feel comfortable with the environmental analogies
are very skeptical when it comes to find a role for planned and “artificial” languages
in a world of natural languages. An important exception, as we have seen, is
Skutnabb-Kangas (e.g., 2000), who bases most of her arguments about linguistic
genocide precisely on the ecology of language perspective.
Nevertheless, many interlinguists believe so enthusiastically in the potential of a
planned language to solve the language problem that they keep on doing research
experiments to prove its advantages, including its propaedeutic advantage (see
Blanke 2001). Also Gobbo (2013) shows that planned languages “can be used to
teach important notions of general linguistics without requiring theorization, but
rather in an active way, when learners actually create their own language.”
Pool and Grofman (1989) study one of the biggest objections to the feasibility
of planned languages: their functional inadequacy. This is an important study,
because it is a pioneering attempt to link theory with empirical data. In order to
test the functional inadequacy hypothesis, a brief experiment was conducted at
a site where numerous speakers of Esperanto could be found: The 69th World
Esperanto Congress in British Columbia. The number of participants in the study
was 135 people. Despite several limitations, the study concludes that in the case
of Esperanto-English bilinguals, problem-solving behavior was not consistent with
the claim that an artificial or simplified language is pervasively inferior to a natural
language as a medium of thought and communication.
In fact, the results show contradictory evidence about the proposition that the use
of an artificial or simplified language will restrict reasoning ability in comparison
with use of a natural language: deductive reasoning question was better answered
in English, whereas resistance to presentation-induced bias was better answered in
Esperanto.46 Different explanations are offered to account for these results. Among
them, several methodological and epistemological problems are presented, such as
the nonrandomness of the sample or the nonexistence of conventional levels of
46 On a side note, the question of the study related to the consistency judgment under uncertainty
is adapted from one used by the seminal article on (psychological) framing effects (Tversky
and Kahneman 1981: 453), which is the basis for the whole of today’s discipline of behavioral
economics.
statistical differences. However, the methodological limitations imply that all the
findings in the experiment are merely suggestive.
For the purposes of this chapter, it is more relevant the fact that, as Mark Fettes
(1998) reminds us, ideas about linguistic justice are far from new and can be traced
back to the origins of Esperanto. In fact, Esperanto was developed as a practical
means of achieving universal linguistic equality. In this article, he shows how social
practices of the Esperanto community reveal an unconscious realization of the ideal
of linguistic equality, even if on a small scale. Thus, without having solved the
problem of unequal linguistic ability, the community has reduced it to a minimum
through linguistic and social means. Moreover, Esperanto speakers have naturally
researched and documented linguistic rights and developed a high level of awareness
and respect for small languages. Fettes also presents the five kinds of linguistic
inequalities identified by Pool (1987) and outlines how the community tries to solve
them through Esperanto:
1. Unequal attributes of different languages. This implies arguments about linguis-
tic rights and linguistic democracy. From this perspective, equal respect should
be granted to all languages, no matter if they are more or less widely spread.
2. Unequal privileges granted to the users of different languages. According to
Fettes, the Esperanto community is able to fight against this kind of linguistic
inequality because in international meetings Esperanto has priority over the other
languages.
3. Unequal linguistic skills of different persons, which also happens in the
Esperanto community. However, in this case, beginners feel safer than usual
because (a) in Esperanto there are no dialects; (2) people often speak clearer than
natives in any language; (c) and people tend to be more patient.
4. Unequal statuses conferred on different persons by linguistic rules and customs.
5. Inequalities co-varying with language but not caused by language. This has to
do with minoritized groups, poverty in countries that used to be colonies, etc.
According to Fettes, in the Esperanto community, this kind of inequality is also
lower than in other contexts, because here there is a (growing) sense of solidarity
among the members.
In the debates about English versus Esperanto as a global lingua franca, the
future of English is far from clear. And this is so because foreign-language
acquisition (including English) involves conscious decision-making and substantial
investments of limited personal and societal resources. According to a previous
work by Fettes (1991), if English becomes ever more identified with globalization,
the latter’s negative effects (including deepening social inequalities and the loss
of linguistic and cultural diversity) may fuel the political search for linguistic
alternatives.
In fact, for the majority of young Europeans, English is seen as the language
of McDonald’s and Hollywood. In other words, a language that provides a quick
and relatively cheap gratification with little substance behind it. And this is not
Shakespeare’s English, but simple English. In this sense, the influential federalist
130 J. Alcalde
and linguist Steiner speaks of a “thin wash, marvelously fluid, but without adequate
base” (1975a: 470).
On another front, Esperanto bases its arguments on matters of principle. Two
ideas: (a) within the optimistic rationalism of the Enlightenment, a planned language
is by its very nature more easily learned than an unplanned national language; and
(b) it offers the political advantage of neutrality. However, Esperanto advocates are
forced to base their arguments on potentialities rather than hard realities, a message
which inevitably has a limited audience.
To sum up, about the future, as Piron (1994) and others have argued, as long
as international communication continues to increase, the position of some world
languages will be strengthened, but there are unforeseeable factors involved so that
English enjoys no guarantee of permanent supremacy. Whereas the future of English
is largely about economics, the future of Esperanto might be more concerned
with culture and identity. That means that in order to better describe the future
trends in this sense, the use of quantitative models might be balanced with careful
ethnographic techniques.
And it is at the level of identity that psychological factors may play a role. In
this sense, Claude Piron (1988) argues that Esperanto awakens deep unconscious
anxieties in many monolinguals: many people cannot tolerate the idea that the
language might be, in certain respects, superior to their mother tongue. This
convinced Esperantist sees the success of Esperanto as a long-term issue. “We are
not talking of the short term or of an abrupt transition. Languages do not come or go
in a few years; their waxing and waning occurs on the time scale of generations.
English has obeyed this rule, and Esperanto, for all its planned characteristics,
inevitably will as well.” The reasons for this slow process are psychological (a
radical concept needs time to be assimilated in popular consciousness), political
(few politicians will support an idea without widespread popular support), and
practical (the difficulties of teaching the language following its acceptance).
Similar to Fettes, Piron argues that different from English, Spanish, or Chinese,
Esperanto’s position will depend on the conditions for international communication
but relatively little on the economic and political balance of power. In this sense, the
rise of a politics of equality on the European and the world scale makes it plausible
that a language which belongs to no particular group can find a wider role to play.47
According to him, language equality in social relations can only be consciously
achieved, by planning and not by accident. From this perspective, English, by its
nature, represents the forces of inertia and inevitably privileges some individuals
and groups above others.
47 About neutrality, Piron has a solid argument. Whereas lexically and historically, Esperanto is
undoubtedly European (the concept of planned language has been developed in Europe while
any a posteriori project seeking global recognition is obliged to base itself largely on Indo-
European roots, whose native speakers make up approximately one-half of the world population),
linguistically, this is counterbalanced by an a priori syntactic morphology, without analogy among
Indo-European languages, and culturally by a universalistic ideological base.
After showing that Esperanto is easier to learn than English and that Esperanto is
a better choice from a democratic perspective (i.e., no particular national language
or culture is imposed) and neutral point of view (i.e., every language retains its
status), Hans Erasmus (1998)—from the working group on the Language Problem
in the European Union—presents two proposals (including several pilot projects)
for the use of Esperanto:
(a) As a bridge language for the interpretation system within the EU, it could make
the system more efficient, enabling a wider use of minority languages; this
reminds the words by Probal Dasgupta (2008) that the main role of Esperanto
today involves people connecting to each other as an interregional language, a
role that English cannot fulfill because it suppresses regional specificities.
(b) As the first foreign language taught in schools, it could make multilingualism
attainable to many (which remind us the propaedeutic value of Esperanto),
while easing the burden on students.
From the perspective of those who work for the promotion of the least used
languages, a potential basis for cooperation with the Esperanto movement has also
been identified, based on a holistic view of linguistic and cultural diversity (Allan
Wynne Jones 1998). In fact, at least 50 million citizens of the EU use daily a
language which is not the language of the state in which they live. According to
Wynne Jones, it should be ensured that intercultural exchanges and the existence
of an international language need pose no threat to linguistic community. And this
seems easier to do through a planned language than through a national language
such as English. This author recommends the creation of a permanent unit for
language planning within an international organization and, interestingly, an advice
for the Esperanto movement: “they take time to develop a ‘business plan’ for the
next fifty or hundred years.”
Kobayashi Tsukasa (1998) offers a slightly different approach to the role of
Esperanto in international communication. Building from some experience in Japan
(in concrete, he mentions fellow Esperantists, such as Akita, Saito, and Hasegawa),
he proposes the use of Esperanto as a tool for global education. This idea is based
on the belief that foreign languages are too difficult to learn, “whether it is Asians
learning European languages or Europeans learning Chinese.” The characteristics
of Esperanto make it adequate for different purposes, such as educating seniors
(who form an ever-increasing part of the population in many parts of the world)
and helping psychiatric casualties to recover the meaning of their existence. He also
mentions the fact that books about Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, or Yugoslavia
were first translated to Japanese from Esperanto editions.
The issue of linguistic justice has also achieved some attention from religious
studies. For example, Deguchi Kyotaro (1998) mentioned the relationship between
Esperanto and the Japanese religious organization Oomoto. According to him, a
fairer world will be characterized by “one god, one world, one interlanguage.”
Similarly, there have been several attempts to link Esperanto and the Baha’i faith.
For example, according to Farhad Pirmoradi (1998), as long as the language issue
can be linked to wider concerns, there is a role for the Esperanto movement
132 J. Alcalde
in building grassroots coalitions of NGOs and in working to improve education

worldwide. In his view, the Baha’i Esperanto-Ligo could work as a bridge between
both movements.48
From a sociolinguistic point of view, some authors, for example, Kadoja (2010),
have studied the relationship between linguistic rights and Esperanto. The fact is that
since the 1990s, the Esperanto movement has introduced the concept of language
rights into its theoretical framework. The objective is to abolish power relationships
in communication in order to achieve language equality. However, similar to Tonkin,
Fettes, and others, the author is also aware that language discrimination also takes
place in the Esperanto community.49 On the one hand, there is the discrimination
related to the level of language competence, i.e., beginner versus proficient speakers.
On the other hand, according to the author, the language itself contains a sexual
dualism which is associated with sex discrimination. In order to deal with the first
issue, he recommends not using idioms and difficult words or expressions and
metaphors associated with the culture of a certain part of the world, because they
might not be understood in other places. In general, the author argues for a different
teaching of the language based on language rights, so that Esperanto speakers will
be able to avoid unconscious discriminations in the ways they use the language.
In my view, there is an interesting debate about the linguistic rights of Esperanto
speakers. According to Wim de Smet in a debate during the Nitobe seminar, “if
languages do not have rights, but their speakers do, native Esperanto speakers could
claim such human linguistic rights” (see Fettes and Bolduc 1998). This would follow
the right of a child to have at least basic education through the medium of the
mother tongue, frequently advocated by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and others. But
to Wim de Smet, even the rest of speakers who use it, not only native speakers,
could also claim them. This perspective is criticized by Yvo Peeters (1998), who
argues that Esperanto speakers have no linguistic rights, because Esperanto is not
a language which belongs to the human rights segment of the person, the people,
or the community. He thinks that Esperanto promoters wanting to prove that it
is a language like the others, and trying to give it the characteristics of a mother
tongue language, are actually doing harm to Esperanto, because they are harming
the fundamental, unique quality which the original Esperantists wanted it to have,
which is that it is a neutral, non-cultural, nonhistorical, non-political, noneconomic,
48 A detailed analysis of the linguistic perspective of the Baha’i can be found in Gregory Paul P.
Meyjes (2006). See also Nordenstorm (2015).

49 Similarly, in a debate during the Nitobe seminar (see Fettes and Bolduc 1998), Tonkin argued that
there is always a relationship between language and power, which is not necessarily a positive one.
While Esperanto speakers are well aware of this and they should emphasize the point, they should
also face criticisms. In this sense, if everybody spoke Esperanto, somebody would be making a
profit out of it. Moreover, it is possible to practice linguistic discrimination using Esperanto, just as
effectively as through the use of other languages. In other words, Esperanto grammar can be used
in many different ways. Moreover, the Esperanto speech community is very effective in excluding
those people who do not speak Esperanto. According to him, efforts should be made to make
Esperanto and the Esperanto movement better known outside their own circles.
non-state, no-nothing-linked language. However, it is worth to mention that in the

European Charter of Regional and Minority Rights, it is languages themselves that
have rights. On another front, Tonkin has also mentioned that language rights are
not simply possessions of threatened minorities, but they are in fact possessed
by everybody. Interesting enough, it seems that the debate on language rights in
association with Esperanto comes mainly from sociolinguistics and legal experts,
and not from Esperanto speakers.
One of the most well-known and influential documents produced by the
Esperanto movement is the Prague Manifesto (1996). According to this document,
a fair and effective language order should be based on the following principles:
– Democratic communication. Given that language inequality gives rise to com-
municative inequality, any system of communication which confers lifelong
privileges on some while requiring others to devote years of effort to achieving a
lesser degree of competence is fundamentally antidemocratic.
– Global education. Given that education in any language is bound to a certain
view of the world, the child who learns Esperanto learns that the world does not
have borders, where every country is home.
– Effective language learning. Given the difficulties in learning ethnic languages
for many students who would benefit from knowing a second language,
Esperanto can help because (a) it is easier, (b) it has propaedeutic value, and
(c) it is useful for language awareness.
– Multilingualism. Speakers of all languages should have a real chance of learning
a second language to a high communicative level. A valuable example is
the community of Esperanto speakers, because all of them are bilingual or
multilingual, without exception.
– Language rights. In the Esperanto community, the speakers of languages—large
and small and official and unofficial—meet on equal terms through a mutual
willingness to compromise. This balance of rights and responsibilities provides
a legitimate place from which assessing situations of language inequality and
conflict.
– Language diversity. Esperantists believe that language diversity is not a barrier
to communication and development, but a constant and indispensable source
of enrichment. Therefore, languages are inherently valuable and worthy of
protection and support.
– Human emancipation. Reliance on national languages should not be exclusive,
because this puts up barriers to the freedoms of expression, communication, and
association. On the contrary, every person should be able to participate fully in
the human community, securely rooted in his or her local cultural and language
identity, yet not limited by it.
In a debate among the participants at the Nitobe seminar (see Fettes and Bolduc
1998), Ralph Harry (p. 177–178) proposes the use of Esperanto as the diplomatic
language. For example, the original version of international treaties could be drafted
in Esperanto. In this sense, he argues that many international treaties have already
134 J. Alcalde
been (unofficially) translated into this language, including those of the European
Union.
From a pure philosophical perspective, Keohane (2016) is concerned by the
fact that linguistic hegemony is linked to unjust forms of influence that remain
undetected, even by philosophers, who are supposed to challenge all unjust forms
of influence. He stresses their responsibility to think beyond any given language,
including English, which also means thinking about translation more.50 In fact,
translation studies have tackled the situations of injustice in the linguistic domain
(e.g., Steiner 1975b; Derrida 1985). According to Pupavac (2012: Chap. 5), rights
to translation have been traditionally linked to language communication rights, but
recent scholarship has shifted to study the limits and violence of translation to the
extent that anti-translation theories have ended up endorsing linguistic governance
based on ethnolinguistic rights.51
6 Law
6.1 Language and International Law
Language rights as a subsector of human rights is a broad discipline of law research.

This approach usually examines the compatibility of national or regional legal
provisions with international instruments. In a way, legal questions aroused to give a
formal discourse to the norms and laws adopted within the design of public policies,
such as education legislation, often with mixed results in practice.52
Sometimes a legal perspective can be a relevant counterbalance to the perspective
of the linguistic market (Calvet 1998, de Swaan 2001) in so far as so-called
linguistic human rights could ensure protection for every linguistic community (e.g.,
De Varennes 1996; Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994), although some of the
existing legal provisions such as the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
are probably unfeasible. Generally speaking, the field of linguistic human rights
is dominated by sociologists. When academic works on language rights take a pure
50 On translation and linguistic justice, it is worth mentioning the recent collection Translation and
Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies, by González Núñez and Meylaerts
(2017).
51 From Pupavac’s perspective, such linguistic governance would have colluded with freedom of
speech. See below Sect. 6.2 on critical legal studies. For a more positive view on multilingualism
as a tool for multilingual democracy, see Pym (2013).
52 For example, from a detailed historical and legal perspective, Arias and Wiley (2015) address
the effects of language education legislation in the United States. They conclude that while it
recognizes that children who speak languages other than English require special resources to follow
instruction in English, this legislation has not established rights to promote minority languages in
education.
legal perspective, the result is not always necessarily of interest for the purposes of
this chapter.
One of the major authors is Jacqueline Mowbray. In a recent article (Mowbray
2011), she explores how international law, as a discourse, approaches questions of
language policy through two concepts: equality and culture. The conclusion is that
the language of international law can be used to advance (but also to limit) claims
by minority groups to use their own languages in different social contexts, claims
which are presented as of linguistic justice.
The same author expands this matter in a book (Mowbray 2012) by analyzing the
many disparate fields of international law which affect language use both directly
(e.g., human rights, minority rights, and cultural heritage laws) and indirectly (inter-
national trade law and international labor standards, among others). Of particular
interest are Sect. 4 (the politics of language) and Sect. 5 (language and participation
in public life), in which the author proposes a course of action to achieve greater
linguistic justice. In my opinion, the most relevant aspect for the purposes of this
chapter is the fact that it includes all the relevant legal provisions that can (legally)
justify a concrete language policy choice. In other words, it provides legal arguments
to many of the proposals that an analysis of public policy could find as the most
desirable ones from a language justice perspective.
Beyond domestic legislations, Vizi (2016) shows that the territoriality principle
also emerges in international documents, such as the European Charter for Regional
and Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of
National Minorities. While states often use territorial requirements as a tool of
political control over minority language use, the interpretation of their obligations
under the two Council of Europe treaties would require a more practical and
technical approach to territorial limitations.
The issue of linguistic justice with regard to intellectual property rights has been
tackled by Falquet et al. (2008). In the same domain, Gazzola and Volpe (2014)
assess the fairness of the language regime of the European Patent Office. After
estimating the language-related costs of asymmetries among European applicants,
the authors explore two possible alternative language regimes based on introducing
a centralized system of financial compensation that covers translation costs borne
by European applicants whose first language is not one of the official languages of
the EPO. The conclusion is that “more multilingualism can be cheaper than less
multilingualism, provided that implicit costs are taken into account.”
Still in this field we can find several articles on linguistic justice for sign language
peoples, such as Batterbury (2012), which argues that a sign language policy (i.e.,
recognizing the minority language status of sign language peoples) is necessary
for language justice. The author affirms that the UN Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities, by employing a human rights approach, offers a regulatory
context that could allow a shift in policy discourse toward the eventual promulgation
of the minority sign language policy.53
53 For a recent research on sign language rights in Canada, see Paul and Snoddon (2017).
136 J. Alcalde
Finally, it is necessary to underline the existence of several law academic works

on “linguistic justice” that have nothing to do with the purposes of this chapter.54
6.2 Critical Legal Studies
Generally speaking, critical legal scholars are skeptical about legal multiculturalism,
because they think that official recognition of cultural rights may collide with
fundamental rights.55 In a recent work, Pupavac (2012) offers solid criticisms to
some of the main policies promoted by multiculturalists, language right advocates,
and ecolinguists. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to argue that the defense
of language rights is shifting from protecting freedom of speech—which should be
its main task—to expanding structures of linguistic governance, which essentially
represent a western community of states and NGOs. In her view, by using
international law against linguistic imperialism, linguistic human rights advocates
are legitimizing situations of legal imperialism.
She builds from the experience of the former Yugoslavia to claim that both
international security approaches and theories of justice based on cultural rights
may foster ethnolinguistic divisions. In Bosnia, assuming that identity-based groups
could be reconciled through recognition, people have been fixed into categories of
difference. This way, their potential to develop relationships beyond their group has
been undermined, and exclusionary projects have been promoted. According to her,
such policies based on ecolinguistic thinking have implied the social reproduction of
ethnic differences and the expansion of external governance of communities, with
negative consequences for civil and political freedoms of the citizens, including
the restriction of minorities’ freedom of speech and cultural expression under hate
speech (and counterterrorism) legislation.
On another front, Pupavac criticizes those sociolinguists who link language rights
violations with the notion of “genocide” or with “crimes against humanity,” because
by assuming the neutrality of international criminal law, they are in fact expanding
the reasons for western liberal military interventions.
Additionally, she points out that if the expansion of English as a lingua franca
represents a form of linguistic imperialism, also the expansion of international
tribunals—with a jurisprudence dominated by western powers and the English or
French languages—should be considered a form of legal linguistic imperialism.
Her criticisms also include the formal recognition of cultural rights. According to
Pupavac, championing such rights has taken place in places such as Bosnia in order
54 One example is Hotta (2012), with the appealing title “Linguistic Justice: A Linguistic Analysis
of Deliberation,” which studies the deliberation in criminal trials in Japan.

55 See Pupavac (2012: Chap. 2) for a discussion of the different generations of human rights and
the tensions that exist between them.

to increase the legitimacy of the state-building efforts and to help people identify
with the new state’s institutions, without providing real political self-determination.
To sum up, Pupavac’s view is critical with multiculturalists, language right
advocates, and ecolinguists, because in her view the legal multiculturalism that
follows from those approaches end up in situations of political injustice. By keeping
always in mind the great picture, this approach is useful to remind us that language
policies cannot be planned in isolation. However, whereas the critical perspective
within this approach is rigorously built, the constructive approach to improve the
current system of linguistic governance is less developed.
7 Conclusions
This chapter has presented most of the main theories about linguistic justice that
can be found in the literature. Although this is quite a new a topic, there are
already relevant and influential studies that have tackled it. And they are growing
exponentially.
In general, political philosophy seems to be the discipline with the highest
amount of proposals that have been made with the aim of influencing concrete poli-
cies. Whereas some link language justice with the promotion of language diversity,
others give more importance to other issues, such as equality of opportunities. In a
way, this is a more sophisticated version of the classic debate between the identity vs
the communicative dimension of languages. Also, the theories that defend language
diversity tend to criticize the role of English as a global lingua franca.
On another front, some of the most promising economic perspectives are the
ones that differentiate between efficiency and fairness, as well as between allocation
and distribution of resources. By creating more and more refined versions of public
policy analysis, they are able to show different preferred results, depending on the
objectives stated. A first potential for interdisciplinary collaboration is identified
here. In other words, economists can use philosophical theories to decide which
aims to prioritize and, therefore, which policy to pursue.
The relationship between philosophy and sociolinguistics also has a big poten-
tial for synergy. Therefore, detailed information about language diversity in the
world and its trends, the phenomena of bilingualism and multilingualism, or
the importance of mother tongue education can all illuminate political thinkers’
understanding of language and help to refine their theories. Also, collaboration with
the ecolinguistic paradigm can improve their analysis in various ways, such as by
taking into account language rights, but also the effects of the situations in which
different languages are in contact, and even the responsibilities of those who are
privileged by current language regimes.
We cannot forget the first authors that were interested in these kinds of issues.
From this perspective, interlinguistics is the discipline that has shown a genuine
sensibility for the topic, arguably from its birth. The research of such authors show
that they can add valuable and inspiring insights as complementary elements to
138 J. Alcalde
every possible solution to language injustice, which could include the use, for
certain purposes, of an auxiliary and neutral planned language.
Finally, the contributions of the legal scholars have already gone beyond the too-
vague category of linguistic human rights to present frameworks in which different
policies can be legally based. In this sense, when confronted with the choice of a
particular language policy that will maximize a particular understanding of language
justice, it should always be possible to use a legal text to make its legitimation
stronger.
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Linguistic Justice: An Interdisciplinary Overview of The Literature

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Linguistic Justice: An Interdisciplinary

Overview of the Literature

This chapter aims at offering an interdisciplinary analytical overview of the different

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 65

2.1 Constitutivism vs. Instrumentalism

Political philosophers have only recently become interested in language policy.

This debate has its origins in the liberalism-communitarianism tension of the

2.2 Alternative Views

linguistically embodied subjects) to characterize multiculturalism and the instrumental nature of

Sect. 2.5 of this chapter.

(c) Situations of linguistic pluralism and linguistic hybridity such as bicultural

2.3 Subdomains of Research

2.4 Schools of Thought

– To what extent is language protection a requirement of justice?

8 See also Patten (2014).

political equality. In fact, there are many examples in which convergence on a

the economics section.

se are Grin (2011) and Morales-Gálvez.

Finally, the ethnicist traditions can be understood as a particular subset of the

pluralism is close to the meaning of linguistic justice by authors such as Kymlicka.

A language policy designed following Réaume’s insights would promote minor-

14 See the economics Sect. 3.3 of this chapter below.

2.4.2 Equalitarian Liberalism

A second relevant school of thought, represented by authors such as Brian Barry or

15 Most of these authors will be explained in depth in the following pages.

Another of Laitin’s works related to linguistic justice and language diversity is

of building a competitive linguistic community would be a form of cultural self-

20 About superdiversity, see also Marácz (2014).

multilingual democracy, such as Belgium or the EU, both composed of linguistically

26 In his view, it is harder to defend an inequality-generating Pareto improvement in the case of

2.5 The Principle of Territoriality and the Principle

29 See also Lacey (2017).

linguistic recognition: Brussels has an officially bilingual status. From a linguistic

31 A similar criticism can be found in Robichaud (2011).

In order to improve the existing theories of justice, he (and similarly Yael

language policy recommendations, this work is nevertheless useful to remind us the

(b) Epistemically, it produces a more limited perception of the world, reduced in

and other languages which are “queen of their domain.”

includes sociolinguistic insights and a non-frequent empirical part on political

In her view, communicative interests rely on people’ linguistic abilities (most

3.2 Language and Status

3.3 Language Convergence and the Survival of Minority

A second category of economic studies has studied the dynamic development of

3.4 Language Policy and Language Planning

to the point that it becomes a de facto internationally widespread language, making

would be replaced by internally cohesive low-density language communities who

of cultural identity. From this perspective, he proposes both a descriptive and a

policy or an oligarchic language regime, would create significant inequalities among

4 Sociolinguistics and Ecolinguistics

41 For a similar approach, see Gobbo and Alcalde (2016).

science, such as Russian or planned languages including Esperanto and Ido.

5 Interlinguistics and Esperantology

45 See also Gobbo (2016).

and it is highly questionable why we should learn a language for communication

in building grassroots coalitions of NGOs and in working to improve education

Meyjes (2006). See also Nordenstorm (2015).

non-state, no-nothing-linked language. However, it is worth to mention that in the

6.1 Language and International Law

Language rights as a subsector of human rights is a broad discipline of law research.

Finally, it is necessary to underline the existence of several law academic works

6.2 Critical Legal Studies

of Deliberation,” which studies the deliberation in criminal trials in Japan.

the tensions that exist between them.